


Siege

by ftmsteverogers



Series: All The Seeds Beneath The Snow [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Clones, Identity Issues, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, mlm author
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-18 18:28:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11880297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftmsteverogers/pseuds/ftmsteverogers
Summary: Steve called him Bucky, and the Winter Soldier was trying to shoulder into that name like a badly-fitting jacket.Or, the one where the Winter Soldier pulls Steve from the Potomac and sticks around this time.





	Siege

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing gets broken in this story that doesn't get fixed.
> 
> You can listen to a playlist I made for this story on [8tracks](https://8tracks.com/barneswilson/i-know-i-m-supposed-to-love-you) or [playmoss](https://playmoss.com/en/jamesbarnes/playlist/i-know-i-m-supposed-to-love-you)!

Siege

/sēj/

 

_noun_

  1. A military operation in which enemy forces surround a town or building, cutting off essential supplies, with the aim of compelling the surrender of those inside.
  2. A prolonged period of misfortune.



 

* * *

 

Steve hit the water first, but the other man was not long to follow.

Steve fell. The Winter Soldier jumped.

 

* * *

 

On the riverbank, water streamed out of Steve’s mouth. The Winter Soldier knelt at his side and touched his lips with the back of his flesh hand, checking for breath. But Steve wasn’t breathing. Water dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

The Winter Soldier performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with jerky, off-kilter motions, both hands trembling, even the metal one. Steve was cold and still beneath him, lips like ice. The bad Potomac water taste of him was all the worse for the copper tang of blood. The Winter Soldier’s hair dripped into his eyes, metal hand glinting as he worked, waterlogged uniform making his limbs feel too heavy beneath the weight of the sunshine.

He knew he was not good at this. HYDRA had not spent equal time teaching him how to save as it had teaching him how to kill. The possibility that Steve might be dead and unrevivable crossed his mind, but he dismissed it. If Steve was dead, then he would die soon after, because he was not going to leave this body again if he could help it. There was nothing else to do. His mind was screaming Steve’s name so loudly it drowned out everything else.

Steve gasped wetly beneath him, coughing, and the Winter Soldier drew back immediately. His left hand clutched at Steve’s lapel briefly, unhappy to be letting go, but Steve’s eyes were fluttering open, so the Winter Soldier put his hand on the ground. His fingertips sank into a fistful of mud.

“Bucky,” Steve rasped. One of his eyes, the bruised one, wouldn’t open.

“Shut up,” the Winter Soldier said, and stood. One of Steve’s hands reached for him feebly before it fell back to his side, but the Soldier wasn’t going anywhere, he was just unbuckling his leather uniform jacket. He peeled it off and tossed it aside, quickly followed by his underarmor vest and right glove. There was nothing to do about his pants and boots and his left glove — he’d need them in order to look as normal as possible in his soaked black undershirt with a wounded supersoldier in tow.

After a moment, he picked up his right glove again and shoved it into his back pocket. Just in case.

“Can you stand?” he asked Steve.

Steve looked up at him, breathing shallowly.

“Never mind,” the Winter Soldier said, and bent to haul him up into his arms.

 

* * *

 

The hospital staff wouldn’t let him into Steve’s room until they were sure he was stable.  The Winter Soldier mentally calculated all the ways he could eliminate the people standing between him and Steve’s bedside, but it was mostly idle thought. He was exhausted. He needed to preserve his energy.

That didn’t make watching Steve get wheeled down a hall on a gurney he was not allowed to follow any easier, though.

He sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair and dripped water onto the floor. Somebody had given him a towel, so he tried to dry his hair with slow, sluggish hands that did not want to do what he told them to. Eventually he gave up and let the damp cloth hang around his neck, head in his hands. Nobody looked at him too hard. They all had more important things to worry about, like all the other people who’d gotten hurt in the helicarrier attack.

Some of which he had shot himself, but nobody seemed to know that by looking at him, so he assumed he was safe. If anybody saw the glint of metal at his wrist between glove and wet shirt sleeve, they probably thought it was a bracelet.

He didn’t know how long he sat there. Long enough that the shadows on the multicolored tile floor stretched out long, sunset streaking through the slats in the blinds. The orange gold of it reminded him of something, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but he thought about it for a good long while. His hand moved in his lap, and he could feel the echo of something soft, something soft and gold.

“Mr. Barnes?”

The Winter Soldier glanced up at the nurse standing in front of him. The name made alarm ring in the back of his head faintly. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Rogers is awake and asking for you,” she said, fiddling with her clipboard.

“Okay,” the Winter Soldier said. He got up from the chair and followed her out of the lobby and down the hallway where Steve had been taken.

The room Steve was in smelled wrong. It took him a second to realize why the antiseptic and badly-recycled air made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, but then Steve glanced up at him from the bed, looking like he wasn’t sure whether or not he was allowed to smile, and the Winter Soldier remembered. He’d been in too many makeshift operating rooms to be comfortable around the smell of iodine and copper-blood.

“Hey,” Steve said.

The Winter Soldier took a hesitant step closer. He wanted to say something in response, but he didn’t know what the right words were. The light coming in through the window melted Steve’s hair into butter, and the Winter Soldier noticed a smear of blood at his temple, just beneath his ear. It curled like an open parenthesis over his skin.

“My friend Sam will be here soon,” Steve said. He didn’t reach out, but his hand flexed at his side. “Are you going to leave, or...?”

“I hung around for hours waiting for you to get out of surgery,” the Winter Soldier reminded him. “It would be counterproductive to leave now.” It was the most words he’d said in a row in a long time. Steve was looking at him hungrily, like he was starving for it, and the Winter Soldier twitched a little under the weight of his gaze.

“You saved me,” Steve said, awed.

The Winter Soldier raked his wet hair out of his eyes. “I almost killed you first.”

Steve smiled. “I’m still kicking.”

The Winter Soldier didn’t have anything to say to that, so he just eased himself down into the chair next to Steve’s bedside, grimacing at the squelch of wet trousers to plastic chair cover. He wanted new socks. He wanted to stop smelling the rubbing-alcohol smell in the air. He wanted Steve to stop looking at him with those wide, wounded eyes.

“You should sleep,” the Winter Soldier said. He felt like they were maybe the right words to say; even with the enhancements made on his body, Steve was still a man, and men grew tired. Especially a man who had three bullet wounds in different parts of his abdomen, who had been bleeding out very recently, who had nearly drowned with the Potomac in his lungs.

“I can sleep when I’m dead,” Steve said, a flash of something stubborn and familiar in his eyes. “Right now I just want to look at you.”

The Winter Soldier shifted in his seat, arms crossed tight over his chest. He cleared his throat and didn’t say anything else. But he also didn’t move away.

 

* * *

 

Sam was on guard the second he walked into the room, and the Winter Soldier couldn’t blame him. He stayed where he was sitting, hands lax and palm-up in his lap even though he would have been more comfortable making fists, because this was Steve’s friend, and it was his job to stop hurting Steve’s friends.

“So you’re Bucky, huh,” Sam said warily. “Back to normal, just like that.”

“Sam,” Steve said, warning in his voice.

The Winter Soldier shrugged a shoulder. “Depends on your definition.”

“Not killing folks would be a start,” Sam said. He looked at the Winter Soldier and the Winter Soldier knew they were thinking about the same thing: his left arm ripping a wing from Sam’s back, metal grinding on metal. The kick to the stomach that had sent Sam flying over the edge of the helicarrier and plummeting down to the ground below.

“I don’t plan on doing that anymore,” the Winter Soldier said, and his left hand twitched closed despite himself.

“That better include vets with wing packs.”

“Sam,” Steve said again, pleading.

The Winter Soldier kept looking at Sam, trying to uncurl his fingers with little success. He could see on Sam’s body all the different places he could be hiding a weapon. He hoped he was right about one or two of them, because he could also see all places on Sam’s body that could be hurt very easily if he tried. “At least you wore a parachute,” he said, thinking about the empty spot on Steve’s back where one should have been installed.

Sam gawked for a second before he shook his head slowly, disbelieving. “Not even gonna apologize?”

The Winter Soldier’s eyebrows raised. “Would you accept it if I did?”

Sam’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t know yet.”

“Well, this is fun,” Steve announced loudly. “But if you’re going to fistfight, can you take it outside? I feel like a nurse is going to yell at me.”

“You’d be used to that, wouldn’t you,” the Winter Soldier replied flatly without looking at him.

 

* * *

 

Sam insisted on being the one to wheel Steve out of the hospital, so the Winter Soldier hung back a couple uncomfortable paces while they went on ahead. Steve kept trying to look over his shoulder, but the Winter Soldier didn’t meet his gaze. He was too busy assessing threats, bringing up the rear and doing the job he was built to do.

He was just doing it for the right person this time, that was all.

Steve called him Bucky, and the Winter Soldier was trying to shoulder into that name like a badly-fitting jacket. It didn’t sit right on his body, didn’t fit right over his bones, but Steve seemed desperate to say it and the Winter Soldier could not begrudge him this. It was difficult, being nameless. He’d been called many things over the past decades, but most of them were not names. He’d been given numbers, titles, and would have been more comfortable with one of those.

But Steve called him Bucky, and his mouth was very soft when he said it, and the Winter Soldier found himself aching when he heard it, even if it put his teeth on edge.

“I’m driving,” Sam announced when they reached the car.

“I could —” Steve started.

“Don’t,” the Soldier and Sam said at the same time, and then looked at each other, startled and disgusted.

The Soldier took the backseat. He tried not to take up much space, and he pulled his gun out of the back of his pants so he could lay it on his thigh. Sam eyed it with an eyebrow raised, but eventually he nodded, and the Soldier was pretty sure it was in approval.

“That gonna do you any good?” Sam asked as he started the engine. “Even though it got wet.”

The Soldier shrugged. “Maybe. Better than nothing.”

Steve met his eyes in the rearview mirror. He looked like he might have wanted to say something, but he didn’t.

The drive to the safe house was mostly silent. Steve tried to make conversation a couple times, but the Soldier wasn’t exactly chatty, and Sam seemed too tense to talk much. The silence gave the Soldier enough space to properly assess the situation, and he glanced between the two men in the front of the car, calculating.

How much would it take in order to keep the two of them alive? The Soldier was willing to pay any price, as long as they would keep telling him who to be.

Night-time stillness made the whole world feel small, road lights sliding over the car every once in a while, illuminating the profile of Steve’s face in brief flashes. The Soldier thought he could probably recognize him by these quick glimpses alone, though, if he had to. He thought he could probably recognize him in the dark.

“Natasha’s directions were kind of vague, but I think this is the place,” Sam said.  The car rolled to a wary stop in front of a quietly suburban home.  There was a light indoors that was dim and yellow.

“That sounds like Natasha,” Steve said.  The Soldier could hear the tiredness hanging heavy in his voice.

The Soldier didn’t say anything, but he saw a flash of red hair in his mind’s eye, and it unsettled him. Defiant green eyes and tiny clenched fists, curve of deadly wrist and ankle, jaw clenched, his own hands on shoulders he felt an overwhelming desire to protect —

“You okay, Buck?” Steve asked.

The Soldier’s eyes snapped upward to meet Steve’s worried gaze.  He didn’t like that Steve could read his discomfort so easily. “Fine. This the place?”

“Yeah,” Sam said.

“Okay,” Steve said. “Let’s do this.”

They trooped out of the car and the Soldier tugged his left sleeve down, making sure the streetlights wouldn’t reflect off his arm. He tucked his gun down the back of his pants again and covered it with his shirt while Sam retrieved the wheelchair from the trunk of the car and steered it around to the passenger seat. Steve didn’t let Sam help him out of the passenger seat and into the chair, but the Soldier saw his white-knuckled grip on the car door and narrowed his eyes.

“C’mon, professor X,” Sam said, rolling his eyes as he got behind the chair and started to push him toward the ramp at the front of the house. Steve seemed to understand the reference, because he gave a little reluctant laugh.

The Soldier decided that he liked it when Steve laughed.

He opened the door for Steve and Sam, glancing over his shoulder at the almost empty street behind them before he followed inside and closed the door. There were four locks on the inside, including a deadbolt, and he locked them all with quick efficiency.

“Close the blinds too,” Sam called out as he disappeared down the hallway with Steve. The Soldier did as he was instructed. It was good to know what was expected of him.

He only hesitated for a moment before he followed Sam and Steve down the hallway. His boots made heavy sounds as they hit the creaky floor, and he heard the low murmur of conversation in the bedroom stop suddenly when he got close enough. He breathed through his teeth as he hung in the doorway, grounding himself, and then he pushed open the half-closed door to figure out what they wanted of him.

 

* * *

 

_“Do you dream?” a HYDRA scientist named Richardson had asked in 1989, when they had stopped being surprised that they did not know everything about his brain._

_“No,” the Winter Soldier answered._

_Richardson cupped the Soldier’s cheek in one gloved hand, running the pad of his thumb over a sharp cheekbone. The drag of leather over cold-raw skin was unpleasant. “I wonder,” the scientist mused aloud, “where we went wrong.”_

_The Soldier didn’t have anything to say to that._

_There were other scientists, other doctors, and they trained him with a fascination that bled into their eyes. Some were detached and cold. Some took delight in causing him pain. Some did not know whether they were disgusted when they looked at him or overwrought with an awe reserved for holy things._

_Some were almost gentle, though, and these were the worst ones._

_“You are going to be devastating,” Richardson said, pinching the Soldier’s chin between finger and thumb in order to keep his face tilted up. His voice was heavy with pride. “Do you know what you were built to do?”_

_The Soldier’s left hand opened and closed around nothing, imagining the shape of a weapon. “Yes,” he said._

_“Tell me.”_

_“I am to be the new fist of HYDRA,” he recited dully. The words were familiar and rust-tasting on his tongue. “I am your hidden weapon.”_

_Richardson smiled, showing teeth. “Good boy,” he said, and released the Soldier’s face. He looked over his shoulder to bark out, “Put him under,” and walked crisply away, but the Soldier wasn’t watching. He let his head loll forward, hair falling into his eyes as he listened to the sounds of the scientists moving around him, the clack of heels on tiled floors, the buzz of electric medical instruments, the rumble of overlapping voices giving each other instructions._

_They buckled him into his icy coffin and put him under._

_The Winter Soldier dreamed._

 

* * *

 

Steve took his medicine reluctantly and slept in the bed with one leg dangling off the edge of the mattress. Sam stroked Steve’s hair back from his forehead, and his eyes were so sad that the Soldier could not watch him do it. He looked instead at his hands, and then his boots, analyzing the scuff marks on the toes. Sam moved around the room quietly, putting things to rights, adjusting where the blanket lay on Steve’s body. Then he sat at the desk and reloaded his gun. The Soldier found this to be very practical.

“You gonna sleep?” Sam asked without turning around.

The Soldier shifted in his seat by the window. “If I require it.”

Sam huffed something that was close to a laugh, but not quite. “Right. Forgot you were an automaton.”

The Soldier was silent for a long while, considering. The dimness of the only lamp made Sam’s anger easier to see. It was warranted, and it was bruising, and the Soldier sat with his mouth parted as he let it seep into him from across the room. It was a gentle kind of anger, he thought. The kind that came from caring.

“How broken are your wings?” he asked eventually, voice soft.

Sam glanced up, brows raised. “You were there.”

“More or less,” the Soldier said with a ghost of a smile.

“Man,” Sam said, shaking his head slightly. “You are gonna break Steve’s heart.”

The Soldier’s eyes moved to Steve automatically, to the shape of him sleeping on his back. One of his hands was on his chest, fingers loosely curled around a fistful of sheets, and his jaw was tight with pain.

“Let me fix your wings,” the Soldier said. He was still looking at Steve, but he could see Sam’s incredulity out of the corner of his eye. “I know that I broke them. Let me fix them.”

“Are you any good at that?” Sam asked dubiously.

The Soldier shot him an amused glance and held up his left hand to wiggle his metal fingers. He almost grinned when Sam ducked his head, laughing, conceding the point.

 

* * *

 

In the morning, Steve managed to sit up and hobble to the kitchen all by himself. Whether or not this was wise didn’t seem to matter to him, apparently, and Sam just followed with his arms crossed over his chest and a distinctly unimpressed expression on his face. The Soldier was already sitting at the kitchen table with pieces of the wing pack’s machinery spread out on a hand towel in front of him.

He looked at Steve. Steve looked back, frowning.

“What’re you doing with those, Buck?” he asked, wincing as he sat in one of the other chairs.

“Fixing what I broke,” the Soldier answered.

Steve picked up a small screwdriver from the table and weighed it in his palm before he put it back down. “Huh.”

Sam, who was rummaging through the cupboard to see if there was anything edible, sighed audibly. “There’s nothing for it. I gotta go get some groceries.”

The Soldier glanced up sharply. He couldn’t keep an eye on both of them if they were splitting up.

Steve was already trying to stand up again, making a face, clutching at his side. “Let me help,” he said, but went down easy when Sam put a hand to his chest and pushed him back into the chair.

“You can help by not dying,” Sam said. He turned to the Soldier. “As for you —”

“I’ll watch him,” the Soldier interrupted, fingers tightening around his pair of needle-nose pliers. Steve was watching him. His longing was blistering. Sam’s surprise was easier to look at, so that was where the Soldier directed his gaze, holding steady. “I’ll watch him,” he repeated. “It’s my job. I’m good at it.”

Sam nodded slowly. “You know, I’m starting to believe you,” he said.

The Soldier was pretty flattered by that.

Sam left to buy groceries and the Soldier helped Steve into the bathroom to wash up. Steve’s arm was around his shoulders as they walked down the hall, white-knuckling around the sleeve over his metal arm, and it felt good to help him sit on the edge of the bathtub. Felt like a job he was supposed to be doing.

The Soldier peeled the t-shirt off Steve’s body and lay it over the back of the toilet, giving Steve enough space to shimmy out of his sweatpants and underwear himself. Steve leaned against the tiled wall after he’d managed it, already exhausted, and the Soldier helped him stand on unsteady legs so he could step into the shower. He wasn’t sure if this was meant to embarrass him or not. Steve seemed comfortable enough to be naked in front of him, so he followed his lead.

“Like old times, eh?” Steve said with a pained smile.

“If you say so,” the Soldier said, turning on the water.

Steve put his head under the spray, sighing. The Soldier didn’t watch him, didn’t say anything, just handed him the shampoo when he asked for it and kept a hand at his wet shoulder in case he started to feel faint.

“You really don’t remember,” Steve said, after he’d rinsed out his hair. His eyes were very earnest, eyelashes wet.

The Soldier shook his head. “Sorry.”

“Don’t —” Steve started, but cut himself off. He took a deep breath. “Not your fault,” he continued, calmer. “I just wanted to know.”

“You were sick when you were younger,” the Soldier said uncertainly. Flashes of images came to mind, scraps of the story. Steve’s profile in the dying light, breathing hard. The way his own right hand looked when it curled around one skinny wrist to feel his pulse. Steve’s forehead, with sweat beading up in pearls; Steve’s hands, clutching at nothing; the low rasp of Steve’s voice as he choked on the name _Bucky_ , choked on water, choked on air, choked on his own swollen tongue.

These were the parts of their shared history that the Soldier recalled most vividly. The parts where he had been afraid were much clearer than the ones where he was not, but even then, it was impossible to look his memory’s Steve dead in the eye. He could only see him in pieces.

“Yeah,” Steve said. He was searching the Soldier’s face for something, anything. The Soldier did not know if he found it or not. “I was. Real sick. You saved my life probably half a dozen times over.”

The Soldier touched Steve’s cheek, where the bruise he had pounded into him was purpling. It was hot to the touch. “Look at us now,” he murmured. It was almost lost under the sound of the running water.

Steve wrapped fingers around the Soldier’s forearm, held onto him, said nothing.

 

* * *

 

Sam arrived when Steve was clean and dressed again, propped up on the sofa and flipping through TV channels listlessly. Sam tossed a pair of jeans and a red henley in the Soldier’s lap as he passed him to go to the kitchen. The Soldier frowned, holding them, and opened his mouth to ask what the hell they were for when Sam called out, “You stink, man. Take a shower. I had to guess on the sizes,” and the Soldier realized that he’d been, to some extent, forgiven.

If this was an olive branch, he decided to unlace his boots and take it.

Navigating the shower alone was a different venture from when he had a job to do, looking after Steve. Shucking off the rest of his ruined uniform felt very good, though, and he tried to focus on that, on the act of turning on the water and stepping into the bathtub. His body was bloody and mud-streaked and scarred. This was not a surprise, and it did not evoke an emotional reaction, but it made him think about the sterile HYDRA bases he’d stayed in most of his life, and the efforts they had taken to keep him clean between missions.

Clean was relative, though, he supposed.

He scrubbed the dirt and dried blood from his arms and back, took the time to work the soap into a lather over his stomach. The water sluiced off his body and trickled down the drain in dirty brown rivulets. He closed his eyes and ducked his head, getting his hair wet, thinking about what was expected of him, and how he could become it.

Steve called him Bucky. Could he answer to that name? If he wanted it enough, if he tried hard, could he earn it?

By the time he was through, steam had fogged up the mirror enough that he could not see himself. This was alright with him. He toweled himself off and put on the clothes that Sam had gotten him, grateful to find that they fit passably well, although a little loose at the waist and tight at the arm. Bare-footed and damp, smelling of mint, he padded down the hall and back toward the living room, where he could hear a woman laughing.

“Bucky,” Steve said, looking up at him as he paused in the doorway. The conversation stopped abruptly.

The woman — Natasha — tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “James,” she said.

The Soldier put his hands in his pockets. “Natalia.”

“You know each other?” Sam asked incredulously, eyes bouncing back and forth between them. “Since when?”

“Since before I was me,” the Soldier answered.

“He means the Red Room,” Natasha corrected. She stepped around the sofa so that she could come up close, studying him, assessing his weak points. He assumed she could find them easily. He was not trying to hide them. “Don’t you, James?”

The Soldier nodded jerkily. He did not blink. Natasha’s eyes were impossible to read and very familiar.

“It’s good to see you,” she said quietly. He froze when she pulled him down into a hug, but he softened into it after a moment, pulling her close with his good right arm. His left lay at his side, warm from the shower and cooling, and he found that he did not want to touch her with it.

Steve and Sam were sharing a loaded glance when the Soldier glanced at them from over Natasha’s shoulder.

“Guess I’ll set out another place for dinner,” Sam said.

“I’ll help,” Natasha said, pulling back. The Soldier stayed very still where she left him.

Steve exhaled audibly. His face was doing something complicated — it didn’t seem to know what to settle on. The Soldier sat on the couch next to him, because that was where he could keep an eye on the whole room at once, and because he knew Steve liked it best when he was at his left side. It occurred to him then, as Steve moved his feet out of the way for him, that Steve had not tried to hug him yet. _Thank god_ , a small voice in his head whispered, but he could still feel the warmth of Natasha’s body if he concentrated, and he could not for the life of him remember what it felt like to be in Steve’s embrace, instead. He missed that knowledge fiercely. The fierceness took him by surprise.

“I knew her,” he said. He fiddled with a loose thread at the knee of his pants.

Steve watched him. “Yeah?”

The Soldier nodded.

“Better than you know me?” Steve asked, mouth twisting.

“No,” the Soldier said. “Just different.”

It didn’t hurt to remember Natasha. HYDRA hadn’t spent as much time trying to remove her from his head as they had Steve. His memories of her were far less sharp to the touch, and he didn’t have to strain as hard to get at them, to feel around their broken edges. The places in his head where he knew memories of Steve were missing were more difficult to interact with. Trying to remember them was like poking a bruise.

“Hey, frostbite, come set the table,” Sam called out from the kitchen. Natasha made a disapproving noise.

“I’m pretty sure that’s me,” the Soldier said to Steve.

Steve shrugged. “Could be worse?”

The Soldier blinked. Well. That was true enough.

He wondered, as he arranged the silverware on paper napkins, what was going to happen next. Natasha’s presence unnerved him, and he knew that although her back was turned to him, she was tracking his every movement. She cleaned and prepared vegetables for stir fry, sharp knife implemented smoothly and neatly. The Soldier stole glances out of the corners of his eyes as he filled glasses of water, set them on the table, and then set himself down in the chair nearest to the corner of the room.

The things he knew how to do with the knife on that cutting board could not be counted on both hands. They just weren’t for polite company.

Steve refused to get help as he got up from the couch, which the Soldier thought was pretty stupid. He limped over to the table and sank down into a chair, face set into what he probably thought was a determined expression, but he was too pale and injured to look anything except pathetic.

Dinner was, all told, a quiet affair. Nobody seemed to know what to say. Forks scraped over plates, eyes avoided making loaded contact as they met over water glasses. The Soldier forced himself to eat slowly and methodically like the others, even though his first instinct was to wolf down what he was given so that it could not be taken from him.  

He looked at Steve as part of his method to avoid this impulse. Watching the way Steve carried his body, holding himself in the strangely effeminate and uncertain way that a man who had been small most of his life would, was a fascination. The Soldier spent a lot of time watching the way those big hands handled flatware and weaponry alike with the same odd delicacy.

The Soldier imagined, occasionally, how it would feel for himself to be the subject of that woundingly gentle touch. It left his mouth dry, his stomach full of aches, his hands itching for something to hold.

Steve, Sam, and Natasha eventually started to talk through strategy for their new life avoiding the public eye, and the Soldier sat up a little better to pay attention. Steve refused to say the words “on the run”, but the Soldier could hear it anyway, implicit. Steve had turned his cell phone off the second he’d arranged to meet with Natasha; there was a reason why they weren’t currently in Avengers tower, why no other costumed heroes were sitting around their dinner table.

“I brought a new set of license plates for your car,” Natasha said, spearing a carrot on her knife and contemplating it before she popped it into her mouth.

“Counterfeit?” Sam wanted to know, rubbing his hand over his jaw.

“You’re from Florida now,” she answered with a grin. Sam grimaced.

The Soldier’s eyes drifted toward Steve again. Steve’s hands were braced on the table with a tight grip. “Are we really gonna be safe here?” he asked. His voice was quiet. “I don’t know how many people know I have Bucky in my custody, but —”

“Fury put it together,” Natasha interrupted. “But no one is coming for you. I didn’t tell the rest of our mutual friends where you are, just that you’re taking a leave of absence.”

“Custody,” the Soldier murmured. “Custody. Is that what this is?”

Steve shot him a little guilty smile. “Bad phrasing.”

The Soldier’s heart raced. _No_ , he thought. _No, that’s as it should be._ Everything that he was belonged to Steve in some way or another. He was decaying wood, he was a dead tree limb that had been grafted onto Steve’s side. The Soldier would clutch at him until he knew who he was or he became a part of him, but either way, he’d get an end to this unbearable unknowing.

 _If he put his hand around my throat, I would lean into it_ , the Soldier thought, and shuddered.

Steve was still looking at him, concern curdling into guilt on his face, and the Soldier had to clear his throat.

“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s all fine.”

Steve seemed to accept this. Sam’s gaze lingered, though, piercing.

“What’s our next move, Steve?” Sam asked. The weight of him looking at the Soldier was so heavy it could’ve pinned him to the floor. “We both know it’s only a matter of time before what’s left of HYDRA regroups.”

Steve sighed. He drained his water glass and considered his half-empty plate for a second before he pushed it across the table at the Soldier. “I’ll need two more days before I’m back in active duty condition,” he said. “But then —”

“Three days,” the Soldier interjected without looking up from where he was scooping up rice with Steve’s spoon. “Maybe four.”

“...Three days,” Steve relented. “But after that, I can’t just sit around while they’re out there planning God knows what.”

Sam nodded. “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“I won’t speak for you, though.” Steve’s hands tightened fractionally more, the Soldier could see his fingertips making indentations on the tabletop. “If you want out, we’ll get you out. You’ve already given me more out of your life than I should’ve asked for in the first place.”

“Shut up,” Sam said, not unkindly. “I’m here. Need my wings again at some point, but I’m still your guy.”

“Speaking of which.” Natasha sounded very pleased with herself. “The wing that was disconnected from the pack was recovered from the Potomac.”

Sam’s eyes went very wide. “Do you have it?”

The Soldier, who had begun to run out of things he could fix without the missing piece, leaned forward to listen. Natasha nodded at the window, through which her beat-up borrowed truck could be seen, the bed filled with something large that was tied down and covered by a dusty plastic tarp. “I brought some tools, too. Ones that might make people look at you strangely if you tried to buy them from Home Depot.”

“Good,” the Soldier said. Everyone looked at him, so he shrugged. “It will be useful to have someone in the air if we’re really taking on HYDRA.”

Steve wetted his lips with the tip of his tongue. “So you’re in it for the long haul, then,” he said, very carefully.

The Soldier looked at the bruise on Steve’s face that was turning green around the shape of his left knuckles. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m here.”

Steve swallowed hard, nodded.

 

* * *

 

The Soldier waited until the others filed off to different rooms to sleep before he slipped back into the kitchen and continued to work on the wing pack. It felt good to do it, and he was good at it, both because of his training and also what he was beginning to believe was a natural inclination. He liked fixing things. He had a vague recollection of a backed up sink, once, and his father’s toolbox sitting on the toilet seat while he knelt in front of the cabinet, shirt sleeves rolled up past the elbow, swearing under his breath for about three hours until it was clear.

The memory came out of nowhere while he was fitting wires back into their casings. He wondered, uneasily, how much more was just waiting for the right trigger to come back to him.

“Did Sam ask you to do that?”

The Soldier’s head jerked as he looked up. Natasha stood in the doorway, arms crossed over her chest, expression carefully mild. She was in sleep clothes, an overlarge t-shirt and shorts, and she was also wearing her thigh holster.

“No,” the Soldier answered.

“So you volunteered.” She sat, unprompted, in the empty seat across the table. She put her chin in her hand. “You look pretty handy.”

“It’s my job,” he said, ignoring the pun.

“Do you remember me?” she asked.

He took the rag from where he’d draped it over his shoulder and cleaned some oil residue from the inside of one of the metal plates that he had laid out in front of him. “That’s a loaded question, Natalia.”

“James,” she said softly. “I watched you die.”

He fumbled the rag and dropped it onto the table. “Guess it didn’t take,” he muttered.

She reached out slowly, giving his eyes time to track the movement, and brushed his hair back from his throat with two gentle fingertips. “They shot you here,” she said, tapping just beneath his ear. “You bled out two feet away from me.”

White noise started to buzz at the base of his neck, swarming up his skull. “You’re wrong,” he said. His voice sounded slightly off, as though coming from far away. “I couldn’t survive that.”

Her eyes were inscrutable. “I know,” she said. “But here you are.”

He had to put his face in his palms, heels of his hands pressing directly over his eyes. He sat there and breathed until yellow spots appeared in his vision. It felt dangerous to think about this, like he was standing on the edge of a precipice, about to lose his footing —

“James,” Natasha said. Her voice swam to him through thick air. “Bucky —”

“Don’t,” the Soldier gritted out. Then, a second later, “James is fine.”

“James,” Natasha amended. “You feel it, don’t you? Something doesn’t add up.”

The nausea that sank into his gut seemed to agree. “Have you said something to the others?” The _to Steve_ was implicit. He looked at her, at the careful set of her mouth, and decided that he could trust her. He hadn’t realized before this moment that this was a decision he had not yet made.

“No,” she answered. “Steve doesn’t want to hear it.”

James snorted. “And you think I do?”

“You’re more rational than he is right now.” She smiled slightly, rueful. “Was I wrong to discuss it with you first?”

He shook his head, scraping a hand through his hair. “What are you going to do?”

“Well,” she said, pursing her lips. She seemed a fraction more comfortable now, and he could understand it; making a plan felt good, felt like you were doing something, even if you weren’t really. “Intelligence is more or less my profession. I think it’s time we both got some answers.”

James, with a head full of secrets he couldn’t quite unlock, with a man he had already died for once sleeping in the other room, had to agree.

“What do you need?” he asked her.

“A blood and tissue sample,” she told him. “And a fully body scan. May I?”

She pulled out a med kit from god knew where, and James offered her his flesh and blood arm. She took the sample with clean efficiency, operating the needle like someone who had done it many times before, and James wondered as she put the vial away what he was getting himself into.

 

* * *

 

He did not sleep well, and he did not sleep for long.

What little he got was haunted by strange dreams. In the dream, he was holding Steve up in the shower again, but this time he was standing in the water too, Steve’s big hands feeling up and down his sides. James touched Steve’s lips with his fingertips and Steve opened his mouth obligingly, letting his fingers slide inside, stroking tongue against them.

Wet body pressed against wet body and James leaned into him, pushed him flat against the tiles, watching the way Steve’s lips wrapped around his fingers. The bow of them was pretty and perfect. Steve met his eyes and sucked, and James clutched at him with his free hand, did not take his eyes off him, woke with the sheets in a tangle around his legs and his breath coming fast and hard.

His body felt hot and foreign. It ached in ways he was not accustomed to. He pressed his face into his pillow, concentrated on slowing his breathing, did not stop until he felt more like himself. Whoever that was.

 

* * *

 

Once everyone was awake, James stalked outside to the garage and put a couple hours’ worth of soldering into Sam’s wing pack. The damage wasn’t as bad as it had seemed at first. But then, he reasoned, he hadn’t been trying to destroy them when he and Sam had fought on the helicarrier. He hadn’t bothered to waste needless energy on what he viewed as just one more obstacle in his path to Captain America.

He thought about Sam, now, about Sam’s smile, and the way he put his hands on Steve like it was easy. James thought about the way Sam didn’t trust him yet but still treated him kindly.

He bit his tongue hard enough to taste blood.

“Buck?”

He looked up from his task, setting down his tools on the tarp he’d laid out on the concrete. Steve was hesitating in the doorway, face working hard at being neutral.

“What is it?” James asked.

“Nat says you’re going by James now,” Steve said, and didn’t say anything else, although it sounded like there was meant to be a second half to that sentence.

“It’s okay,” James said. He licked his lips. “You can call me what you want.”

Steve made a small, frustrated noise. “I wanna call you what you wanna be called.”

That sat weirdly on James, and he had to think about it for a second, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “I like it,” he said eventually. “When you say my other name.”

Steve nodded, ducking his head to hide his smile, and James felt warm, the way he always did when he accidentally stumbled across the right thing to say.

“Come in for lunch soon, okay?” Steve said.

“Okay,” James said.

 

* * *

 

When Natasha had released all of SHIELD’s data onto the internet, the Winter Soldier’s files had not been among them. They should have been. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved that they weren’t.

“Maybe they were stored in a different database,” Steve said uneasily.

“It’d make sense,” Sam said. He was scrolling through a tablet Natasha had given to him, loaded up with SHIELD intel. “To keep their information in more than one place.”

James nodded. It did make sense. Steve’s expression had turned stormy, because he never liked to think about HYDRA like that, like they were capable of doing things right. But the fact that they were a competent organization was why they were so dangerous. They were effective, they’d managed to do their damage silently for nearly seventy years uninterrupted, and James thought that minimizing that was dangerous. Understandable, but wrong.

“Is that why Natasha left?” he asked, choosing his words carefully. “To dig up my files?”

Steve shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “That was one of her reasons, yeah.”

James nodded absently, but he was thinking about Natasha’s eyes when she had told him he’d died in front of her, the cold that had washed over him when she described the bullet that had gone through his head. He didn’t want to think about it, but his mind chased it around in circles, grasping at something just barely out of reach.

He hoped she found what she was looking for. For both their sakes.

“Huh,” Sam said. James and Steve glanced up at him at the same time.

“Well?” Steve said.

“I don’t have Barnes’ file, here, but there’re a couple references to other members of, uh...” he trailed off, brow creasing. “...The Forget-Me-Not Protocol. Sounds kinda like something.”

Steve frowned. “How many others?”

“Almost a couple dozen.”

“Jesus.”

“There are others?” James asked quietly. That low buzzing was back in his ears, along with heavy dread that sat in his stomach.

Sam nodded, scrolling. “Looks like the program was discontinued in ‘89, but not before they trained at least twenty people since the ‘40s.” He glanced up at James and then back down again. “Guess we can sorta gather what they mean by training.”

Yeah. James guessed they could.

“So for all we know, there are other Winter Soldiers out there,” Steve was saying, and Sam was saying something in response, but James’ head had gone fuzzy and strange and their voices could no longer reach him.

Others. He knew about the others, didn’t he? If he approached it dead on in his mind, it slipped through his fingers like sand. But he knew their faces were somewhere in his brain, lurking in one of the cobwebbed corners, and he thought, if he could just concentrate hard enough, maybe he could dredge them up from the abyss in his skull. He wasn’t meant to remember them. HYDRA had tried hard to drain them from his memory. But HYDRA had tried to do that with many things, and his brain kept healing and re-healing despite it, and now he was grappling with the fragmented shards that remained. They were sharp as knives. He clutched at them anyway.

Others like him.

Pale faces in the dark, flash of skin as a hand reached out to touch his cheek.

 _“I’m sorry,”_ someone said, in a voice that he recognized.

Someone else made a fist around a handful of his hair. A metal headpiece was fitted to the back of his neck, connected to a long, ribbed, clear plastic hose. He didn’t know what the hose was connected to at the other end, or why it was jammed at the base of his skull.

 _“Careful, he’s waking up,”_ someone said, with a thick accent. German? No — Russian?

He heard the crackle of electricity before he felt it, and by then, fear had already frozen him where he was sitting. He could taste the fear on the back of his tongue. It was very bitter.

“Bucky, Bucky —” Steve said, and James’ eyes snapped open. He hadn’t realized he’d closed them. The table in front of him had gouge marks where his fingers had dug into it, and Steve’s hands were on top of his now, fingers curled around his wrists. He hated that. He understood why Steve was doing it, though, so he didn’t lash out, just sat there and breathed hard until Steve knew he was back in his body and would no longer cause damage to their surroundings.

“Where were you?” Sam asked after Steve pulled back. James expected to see judgement when he looked at him, but Sam’s eyes were dark and alive with understanding. Startlingly so.

James tried to make words come out of his mouth, but they were stuck, and they stung when he worked his tongue around them. It was like trying to talk around a mouthful of broken glass. “There _were_ others,” he managed after a couple seconds of this struggling. “I knew them.” He had to scramble to his feet so he could gag into the sink, spitting up bile. He panted, cheek pressed to cool granite countertop. _Fuck._

Steve looked agonized when James finally raised his head. “Can you tell us more?”

James shook his head. “They — put something in my brain. Can’t talk about it. Hurts.”

“It’s okay,” Steve said. He tried to reach out to touch James again, then thought better of it at the last second and let his hand fall back into his lap. “It’s okay, Buck.”

It wasn’t, but James was willing to let it go for now. He raised a hand to the back of his neck, feeling the raised bump of a circular scar at the base of his skull.

 

* * *

 

The next four days passed very slowly. Steve healed and started to train — saying, “Gotta get back into fighting shape,” with a grin — although he hadn’t really been on his back long enough for his muscles to atrophy. James was pretty sure that the serum wouldn’t have let that happen even if he had stayed still for weeks, but Steve looked like he needed to be moving, and that, at least, was something James could understand.

Sam studied the intel and planned, dashing out for supplies and usually coming home with Natasha. The three of them sat around the table, bickering over schematics and takeout containers, taking turns keeping an eye on the crack in the blinds.

James fixed the wing pack.

Natasha’s tools were a great help. He worked quickly, efficiently, cycling between tinkering in the garage, looking in on the three friends as they made plans, and checking the safe house’s perimeter for weaknesses. He didn’t find any. This did not keep him from repeating his checks every couple of hours. This was what he was good for, and he intended to keep doing it until someone told him to stand down.

He either slept on the couch or with his back pressed against the wall, a rifle he found in the hall closet held between his bent knees. He slept, he dreamed, he worked, he waited for a mission.

A mission. Yes. This was the other thing he would be good for.

He had been out of cryostasis for long enough now that his left arm started to ache with the programmed need to return to base. He could ignore it with moderate success, and that was what he was doing, but it called to him. _Come back,_ a small, insidious voice whispered in the back of his head. _Come back to base to be reset._

He itched for a fight.

“Whoa,” Sam said, hands on his hips. “You really — huh.”

“I told you I could do it,” James said. “It should work.”

The wing pack sat, completed, on the tarp in the garage. It was still a little dented, but James was satisfied with its functionality, and it made a promising sound when Sam shouldered into it and turned it on. It whirred quietly, like James’ left arm, plates moving seamlessly and whisper-smooth as the wings extended.

Sam shot him a sidelong glance, although it was at odds with the grin that was blooming over his face. “The engine isn’t gonna cut out when I’m a thousand feet in the air, right?”

“That’d be a hell of a long con,” James said. “But no. It should work fine.”

“Guess it’s time to hit the road, then,” Sam said. There was a warmth in his eyes that James had never seen directed at him yet — usually it was reserved for Steve. “You in the mood to kick some Hydra ass?”

 _Yes_ , James thought, feeling adrenaline slide slick and hot into his belly. _Yes. A mission_.

“When do we leave?” he asked. The smile Sam gave him in return was incendiary.

 

* * *

 

“Are you sure you want to come along?” Steve asked. He looked slightly nauseous. “You don’t have to do this. We can do it without you.”

James bristled. “This is what I’m good for,” he said. “This is the one thing I’m good for. Let me do it.”

“I’m not trying to stop you,” Steve said helplessly. “I just thought —”

“I need a job,” James interrupted. There was an edge of desperation to his voice. “Give me something to do. Please.”

Steve looked torn. Sam touched James’ elbow, and James turned, surprised. “You really wanna do this?” Sam asked. There was that warmth again, unexpected and shocking. It sat well on his face, and James thought, _this is a face that was built for smiling._

“Yes,” James said.

“Okay,” Sam said. “You can take shotgun.”

James did.

Steve gave Sam directions from the backseat. They were heading to a base Natasha told them to hit, and as cagey as she was, Steve seemed to trust her intel. He spread out a map in his lap and followed it with a forefinger along their path.

James assembled his rifle in his lap, glancing up every now and again to make sure they were alone enough on the road to prevent anyone from seeing what he was doing. His gun felt good in his hands. Heavy. Solid. He opened and closed his fist around the grip, feeling the worn-out places it had been held by someone else, and considered putting on his leather gloves.

“What’s got you smiling like that?” Sam asked. James looked up at him. Sam was smiling too, a small crooked thing.

“This feels good,” he explained. He hadn’t realized he was smiling. “I get — restless.”

“Can’t stay still too long, huh,” Sam said. His eyes were on the road, but James could feel Steve’s gaze on him, could see the reflection of their blue in the rearview mirror. “Steve’s like that too. Part of why he’s such a bad patient.”

“C’mon, Sam,” Steve said, mouth twitching reluctantly. “That isn’t fair.”

“Am I wrong?” Sam reached behind himself blindly to shove Steve’s knee. “Can’t go one fuckin’ hour without jumping off of something tall without a parachute.”

“Only ‘cause I know you’ll catch me,” Steve said. James and Sam shared a loaded glance, but neither of them addressed the lie.

“How much farther, Steve?” Sam asked.

“Fifteen miles,” Steve answered.

James took his rifle apart just so he could reassemble it.

 

* * *

 

_In 1997, the Winter Soldier was thawed out for his routine refamiliarization with weaponry. Richardson, his handler, passed him gun after gun and watched as he fired them to test for any errors. The Winter Soldier proved with every paper target that the ice had not caused him to forget how to kill effectively, using rifle, revolver, shotgun. His hands fit well around weapons._

_“You’ve done much better than we expected,” Richardson said, with a hand on the back of the Winter Soldier’s neck, underneath his hair. He meant this as a compliment. “Much better than the others.”_

_The Winter Soldier accepted a handgun and aimed it at the wall. He did not look at Richardson and hit the target dead center._

 

* * *

 

“Can you find a good vantage point out here?” Steve asked, shading his eyes with a hand as he glanced up at the treeline and the shapes of other buildings surrounding the base.

“I’m not going in with you?” James said. His pulse started to quicken.

Sam put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing. James did not lean into it, but he didn’t pull away either. “You’re our exit route,” Sam said. “We need you watching our backs.”

James didn’t like it, and he said as much, but Steve made an unhappy noise and said _please, Buck,_ so that was how James found himself perched up high and lying on his stomach. He had one thigh on either side of the tree limb he was lying on, rifle angled so that he could see the door through his scope, and he wore an earpiece that Sam had given him so that he could listen to him and Steve murmur strategy to each other as they prepared to bust into the base.

He settled in as best he could. This was what he’d wanted, he reminded himself, but he hadn’t imagined it like this, so far removed from the action. He’d wanted to stand at Steve’s left side the way Steve liked. He’d wanted to watch the way Steve would bare his teeth as he ducked under punches and tore into HYDRA agents with his shield and bare hands.

If he concentrated hard, he could hear Steve breathing over comms. It was a painfully familiar sound. He made an effort to match their breaths, he looked through his scope, he waited to hear violence on Steve and Sam’s end.

It had been easier for him when he’d just been able to follow orders without caring much about the outcome.

The earpiece couldn’t pick up much of the surrounding noise, but he could tell the moment directly preceding the battle. One startled breath from Steve and James’ stomach tensed, re-aiming his gun to get a better visual. He fingered the trigger.

On other missions, the missions he remembered best, he had been able to stay still for hours in the snow or on the street. He had been dependable and trustworthy because that was how they had designed him. He struggled, now, with staying on his mark. He could hear Steve and Sam panting in his ear, grunting with exertion, crying out when a target managed to land a punch.

This proved that they were alive. James still hated it.

The two of them came rushing out after about twenty minutes of this, HYDRA agents hot on their heels, and James made a relieved sound back in his throat as he picked them off one by one. Finally. He was very good at this, just as good as he’d always been, he made headshots with an ease that had always somewhat frightened his superiors. A HYDRA agent put his hand on Steve’s shoulder and James shot him in the throat. An agent swiped at Sam with a knife and James cut him down with two bullets to the chest.

“Retreat back to the rendezvous point!” Steve hollered. The stream of agents out of the base had slowed to a trickle. How many inside had he and Sam taken out?

“Doing my best!” Sam called out, strained, from somewhere up above.

James decided to make an executive decision and slithered out of the tree. Ground fighting was better, if only because he could feel it in his hands when he made contact. His metal fist made a satisfying sound when it connected with a HYDRA agent’s jaw, sending him sprawling onto his back.

He took them on two, three at a time. Some of them knew who he was and kept their distance. Some of them didn’t, and James took them down viciously, Steve’s body in his peripheral vision always. There was a tug at the pit of his stomach, telling him to finish his final mission while his gun was loaded, while he still had a chance. Steve’s unprotected back was right in front of him, curved into an arch as he tackled an agent to the ground.

James bashed someone’s face in with his flesh and blood hand. He felt his knuckles split, but it took a couple seconds for blood to well up, and by that time he’d already moved on to the next one.

The fight ended with Steve physically hauling James up off a body he was laying into. James scrambled to his feet, gasping for breath, and Steve touched his face, his neck, still making a fist around the back of James’ jacket collar. James grinned, showing him teeth that were wet and red with blood.

“Jesus, Buck,” Steve breathed.

James leaned forward and kissed him.

Steve recoiled as if he’d been burned. James wanted to chase his mouth, but he didn’t, just swayed a little onto the balls of his feet and then back again.

“What,” Steve said. “You — _what_.”

James stared at him, glassy-eyed. There was a smear of blood at the corner of Steve’s mouth. “Did we not,” he said, and stopped.

“No.” Steve let go of James’ jacket, but that was only so he could hold his shoulders, keep him at arm’s length. “No. We never did.”

James reached up to wipe the blood off Steve’s lower lip with the pad of his thumb. Steve twitched, but let him.

“I hate to interrupt,” Sam said. “But we gotta get moving. Can we do this later, or —”

“Yes,” Steve said. He let go of James, although he did not take his eyes off him. “Yeah. Fuck. C’mon, James.”

 _He hasn’t called me that before_ , James thought, and shouldered his rifle strap, feet feeling strangely heavy as he followed Steve and Sam back to the car.

 

* * *

 

The feeling of Steve’s mouth. Warm, soft. Tasting of blood. James kept stroking his fingertips over his lips on the dead silent ride home, and even by the time they were trooping back up the stairs, it still felt strange.

Steve tossed his shield onto the kitchen table and handed Sam the flash drive of information they’d stolen from the Hydra base.

“Get this to Nat so she can decrypt it,” he said. It was still his Captain America voice. He didn’t look at James. He hadn’t looked at James since they’d gotten into the car.

“Gotcha.” Sam took the flash drive and weighed it in his hand before he slipped it into his pocket. He hesitated, and then — “Are you two going to be...?”

“Okay?” Steve finished for him. “Probably. Get going.” Sam raised his eyebrows at Steve’s tone, and Steve deflated. “...Sorry, Sam. I don’t mean to bark orders.”

“I’ll do it,” Sam said, patting his pocket with the flash drive. “Because I know it needs doing. But I was sort of under the impression we were working as a team.”

“We are.” Steve scuffed a hand through his hair. “Sorry. Again.”

Sam touched Steve’s shoulder. Steve leaned into it, and Sam sighed when he pulled away, although he paused when he got to the door. “You want me to stay?” he asked James quietly.

“No,” James said, just as quiet. “It’s going to be fine. Sometimes he yells, then he feels better.”

Sam’s expression softened a little. “Did you just remember that?”

James lifted his shoulders in a somewhat helpless shrug.

“Well. Have fun with that,” Sam snorted, clasping James’ shoulder in passing, and left, closing the door behind him. James and Steve were alone in the room, then, weird energy crackling between them like it was a physical entity, like it was something you could reach out and make a fist around.

“Jesus, Bucky,” Steve sighed. “Why’d you do it?”

“I won’t do it again,” James said.

“Buck.” Steve looked pained when he finally made himself look at James, jaw clenched tight. “Did you — did you think that you _owed_ —”

James inhaled sharply. He pushed off of the doorway and stalked toward Steve, who was frozen in the middle of the kitchen, watching James’ movements with frightened eyes. It took getting up close to him for James to realize that Steve was trembling.

“I thought I was getting it right,” James said. “Did we really never...?”

“No,” Steve said. He swallowed convulsively. “I — Buck, you don’t even like men.”

“How do you know?” James asked. He put his hands on Steve’s hips. They fit very well.

“Because I tried to kiss you before you went off to war,” Steve said, panicked, all in a rush. “And you — you couldn’t kiss me back. You tried, but it didn’t work. You said you wished you could love me like... like I loved you. But.”

“Past tense?” James asked.

“Present tense,” Steve admitted.

James kissed him again.

Steve whimpered, kissing back for two glorious seconds before he pulled away again, although he didn’t pull back far — just far enough to cradle James’ face between his hands and search his eyes, thumbs stroking over cheekbones. Steve’s hands fit very well, too. “I’m not asking you for this,” he said, voice raw. “You don’t need to do this for me to care about you.”

“I like men,” James protested. “I like you.”

“Buck,” Steve said.

“Let me.” James said this in the way that he had said _give me a mission_ earlier that day. “I want to. Let me.”

Steve’s hands slid down James’ face to cup his throat, and James’ premonition had been right, because he leaned into them with his eyes fluttering closed.

“Christ,” Steve whispered, drawing back. “I _can’t_ —”

“You can,” James said. “If you want it.”

“I’m not going to take advantage of you!” Steve’s voice started to go strained and wavering, so James put metal fingertips to his mouth, then his jaw, trying to distract him. He could feel Steve’s pulse jump.

“Steve.” James wetted his lips with the tip of his tongue. He knew he had to be careful with this. “A lot of things are missing in my head right now. I’m only very confident about two. Do you know what they are?”

Steve shook his head.

“I know that I’m good at killing,” James said. “And I know that I’m supposed to love you.”

Steve’s eyes were wide as saucers.

“I’m probably not very good at loving,” James tried to say, but then Steve was cupping the back of his neck and kissing him hard, and James had to catch him up in his arms. Both arms, one much colder than the other, but Steve didn’t seem to mind — now that he was getting with the program, he shoved James up against the counter, setting teeth against James’ lower lip.

“Yes,” James gasped into his mouth. _Yes. Take me in. Make me someone I can understand._

Steve unzipped James’ tac vest so he could slip his hands inside. James arched his back, pressed their bodies together flush, stomach to stomach and chest to chest. He could feel the raised outline of the star on Steve’s uniform against his breastbone.

“Not very subtle,” James commented. Steve, who had bent his head to mouth over James’ throat, made an inquisitive noise. The vibration against skin made James shudder. “The uniform,” he clarified. “I thought we were aiming for ‘covert’.”

Steve leaned his forehead against James’ shoulder. James could feel his sigh against his neck. “I was hoping something familiar might do you good,” he admitted. “I wore this in WWII.”

“It’s a good look,” James said. “I like the view from the back.”

“Bucky!”

James smirked at Steve’s scandalized voice. He petted down the small of Steve’s back so he could get a handful of his ass, squeezing, feeling Steve’s shocked breath as much as he heard it. Steve’s hips stuttered forward. James nudged Steve’s nose with his own and they started kissing again, slow and deliberate, tongues stroking together. James licked into Steve’s mouth and Steve let him, one of his big hands cupping his jaw.

James had wondered, what now felt like ages ago, what it would be like to have all of Steve’s attention on him at once. The answer was that it was very good and very overwhelming. He let his legs fall open so one of Steve’s thighs could slide between his own, groaning low in the back of his throat, and Steve froze.

“You’re hard,” Steve said wonderingly. Almost awed.

James blinked. “Did you think I wasn’t... functional?”

Steve looked guilty. “Still kind of thought you weren’t queer.”

James huffed, aggravated, and palmed Steve’s ass again, pulling him in by his belt loops until Steve got the picture and grinded up against him. “Feels pretty queer to me,” he murmured to the juncture where Steve’s jaw met his skull. Steve shivered when James tugged at his earlobe with his teeth.

James didn’t remember how to do this, but his body seemed to have some idea. He tugged at Steve’s uniform until he found the hidden clasps and managed to get the front open, then he pulled away from Steve just long enough to take off his gloves with his teeth. Steve’s hands drifted down to his hips and held him tightly, watching.

“Are we really doing this in the kitchen?” Steve asked, biting his lip when James skidded his bare left hand over his stomach and then his ribs.

“Yeah,” James said, and kissed him again.

He hadn’t been touched by someone who didn’t want to hurt him in a very long time. He tried to think about the last time he’d done this with anyone, but his memories were fuzzy and vague, and it was difficult to think hard when Steve was undoing his fly and rucking up his shirt to stroke over his bare stomach.

“Bucky,” Steve said, reverent, as he got a hand around James’ cock.

James’ breath caught in his throat. He pressed his face into the crook of Steve’s neck and panted, shaking, grateful for the counter against his back so he could have something to lean on as Steve jerked him off. He had a feeling that his knees would’ve given out, otherwise.

Steve murmured sweet things in his ear, but James couldn’t focus on them. He felt hot all over, warm and strange, and when Steve rubbed his thumb over the sensitive spot just beneath the head of his cock, his orgasm caught him by surprise with a high, keening noise that he muffled with a bite to Steve’s shoulder.

“Whoa.” Steve slowed his hand. “You — you alright there, Buck?”

James nodded. He grasped at the buckles of Steve’s pants, worked at getting them undone, slipped clumsy fingers inside to curl around Steve’s cock. It was heavy in his hand, weeping precome at the tip. He smeared it with his palm so he could stroke Steve wetly, easily.

“God,” Steve hissed. “Fuck. Are you sure you want to...?”

“Let me,” James said, voice husky, and twisted his wrist. “How many times are you going to make me say it?”

Steve was crying. It was difficult to tell, at first, because he didn’t make any sound, but tears leaked from the corners of his eyes as he stole kisses and breathed hard and fucked James’ fist. James kissed the tears from Steve’s face, lips softly dragging over temple and cheek, and when Steve came, it was with a choked-off sound that was just as likely to be a sob as it was a moan.

 

* * *

 

Sam called while Steve was toweling off his hair from a shower. James sat on the couch in a pair of Steve’s sweatpants and no shirt, loose-limbed, eyes half-lidded as he watched Steve pick up the phone.

“Hey, Sam,” Steve said. His face went from worried and vaguely guilty to business-mode in a second. “...Other third? I thought we got all there was to get.”

“Put him on speaker,” James said, sitting up. His body was tense again.

“One second.” Steve fumbled the cell phone until it was sitting on the coffee table between them. “You’re on speaker, Sam.”

“Good,” Sam said. “You guys too. I met up with Nat.”

“Hi,” said Natasha.

James worried the inside of his cheek between his teeth.

“Our flash drive is only a third of the data on — uh, the Winter Soldier,” Sam said. “Nat got the second piece.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Natasha interjected. “By the way. If anyone was wondering.”

Steve rolled his eyes, smiling slightly. “Your sacrifice is noted. Any luck decrypting it?”

“Some.” She sounded troubled. “We’re only about four percent in and I’m already really not liking the direction it’s going. I was wondering if you’d given any more thought to the idea of contacting some of our other friends.” She paused. “One in particular.”

“I’m not sure I can deal with Tony right now.” Steve rubbed a hand over his forehead and pinched the bridge of his nose between forefinger and thumb.

“I’ll deal with Tony,” Natasha said smoothly. “What concerns me is the missing third.”

“Fuck,” Steve muttered, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Okay. You and Sam go reconnect with the other Avengers, Bucky and I will go after the missing piece. You know where it is?”

Natasha made an affirming noise. “I’ll send you the coordinates.”

“I’ve never met the Avengers,” Sam pointed out. “Just you guys, and we haven’t done a whole lot of avenging. We’ve mostly been running around screaming.”

“That’s pretty much what we do,” Natasha said. “It’s a very demanding job.”

“Could be your job,” Steve said. Everyone went very quiet. He cleared his throat, adding, “Officially, I mean. And only if you want it, Sam.”

“Officially, huh,” Sam said softly.

“Turns out giving you shit at the National Mall was the best decision I’ve made in a century,” Steve replied. “I intend to keep doing it.”

James looked down at his lap, thinking about that. About the best decision he’d made in a century. Fishing Steve out of the Potomac had barely felt like a choice at the time, it had been an automatic reaction, like snatching his hand away from a hot pan on the stove.

Still. He’d done it. And he had Steve, warm and alive, to show for it.

“I don’t get the feeling this can be a part time gig,” Sam was saying. “I’d have to quit my job at the VA.”

“Give it some thought,” Steve offered. “Meet everyone else on the team before you decide.”

“Thanks, man.” There was a smile in Sam’s voice that was audible. “I’ll do that. You and James gonna be good for this mission?”

Steve glanced over at James. James nodded emphatically.

“We’re good,” Steve said.

“Alright. We’ll keep you updated,” Sam said, and hung up.

Silence landed for a couple of seconds while they both processed this. James’ history was just as scattered outside his head as it was inside, and he really felt it, now, just how badly HYDRA wanted to keep him in pieces. So much of who he was had to be downloaded from a computer to be remembered, to be recovered.

Steve’s phone pinged. “The coordinates,” he explained.

“How far?” James asked.

Steve scrolled a little, frowning. “Only a two hour drive.”

“Should probably hold off ‘til tomorrow. Two missions in one day is a bad idea,” James yawned, stretching his arms over his head. Steve watched him carefully, like he was trying to remember it well for later, and James watched him back through his eyelashes.

“What’re we going to do until then?” Steve asked.

“I’ve got a couple ideas,” James said, and leaned back into the couch, holding a hand out for Steve to take.

“Already?” Steve’s sounded amused as he took James’ hand.

“Yeah.” James grinned. “I think it’ll take a lot to wear me out.”

 

* * *

 

_“We are running out of time,” someone said in James’ memory, a hissed whisper. “One through seventeen have all failed us.”_

_There was a sound of metal grinding on metal, a door slamming shut and locking._

 

* * *

 

Steve came with James' cock in his mouth, moaning around it with his own hand moving between his legs. James hauled him up and kissed him, kissed him hard; he tasted himself on Steve’s tongue and tangled his fingers in blond hair.

 

* * *

 

 _“And Asset number eighteen_ —”

_“That’s the unstable one, sir.”_

 

* * *

 

James fucked Steve into the mattress and held him down with a hand on the back of his neck until Steve was dry-sobbing into a pillow. "Baby, baby," James said, petting down his shoulder, and Steve arched his back, as if their bodies could possibly get any closer.

 

* * *

 

_“I’m afraid we don’t have a choice. He’s the farthest along, and they’re only going to authorize us the one last chance. We can’t afford to start from scratch.”_

 

* * *

 

James sat in Steve's lap and kissed him until Steve’s breath went ragged and urgent. "Can you come like this?" he asked, grinding a little against his hip, and Steve nodded frantically, rubbed up against James’ stomach and let James suck on his tongue until he came all over his belly.

 

* * *

 

_“We’ll have to rush it.”_

_“I’m willing to take that risk.”_

 

* * *

 

Steve held James' face between his hands and said, "I'm so glad I have you back, Buck," with a smile that wavered.

James nodded his agreement and tucked a lock of sweat-damp hair behind his ear. He felt like he was wading through honey, his body was so heavy and satisfied, muscle gone liquid and useless. Steve was flushed all the way down his throat, and it was very nice to look at, it was a relief to know James could use his body in a way that could make someone feel good. That he could raise blood to the surface in a way that was not violent.

Steve pulled him close to his chest, lying James’ head over his own heart. James went willingly enough, curled up half on top of him, stayed still while Steve arranged the covers over them both. He liked being plastered up against Steve’s side, where he could hear Steve’s heart beating loud and strong beneath his ear.

Steve turned out the light. “Do you remember when we used to sleep together?” he said. “Uh — just sleeping. In the winter.”

James pressed his face into the hollow just beneath Steve’s jaw. “No.”

“You used to hold me like this. For warmth.” Steve pressed a kiss to the crown of James’ head. “It’s nice to get to return the favor.” A pause. Then, softer, “I really missed you, Buck.”

James wished he could say the same. He wished it so hard it made his teeth ache.

 

* * *

 

With his feet kicked up on the dashboard, guns and ammo in a duffle bag in the trunk, James felt right at home. Steve was tense, though, hands tight around the steering wheel, and he kept flicking little nervous glances sideways toward the passenger seat. James kept his eyes closed behind a borrowed pair of sunglasses. He wasn’t dozing — he was too keyed up for that — but pretending made it so that neither of them had to talk about what they were about to do.

It had occurred to him, on their way toward the base, that Captain America didn’t usually take revenge missions. But then, maybe the reclamation of James’ past wasn’t considered revenge by anyone but himself.

“We crossed the stateline yet?” he asked after a while, voice almost lost in the rumble of the engine. Steve looked over at him, though, smiling, and James found himself smiling back automatically.

“Almost,” Steve said. He reached over and put his hand on James’ thigh, squeezing briefly.

James tried to push his leg up subtly into Steve’s hand.

 

* * *

 

“On my count,” Steve said.

James adjusted his grip on his gun, nodding.

Steve opened his mouth, hesitated, and then closed the distance between them with two long strides so he could cup the side of James’ throat and steal a quick, determined kiss.

“D’you have a thing for the tac vest, or something?” James asked, eyebrows raised, once Steve had pulled away.

Steve was unimpressed. “I’ve got a thing for you,” he answered. “You ready?”

“I wasn’t the one that felt a need to neck near a HYDRA base,” James pointed out.

Steve flushed. “That wasn’t _necking_ , Buck.”

James smirked. Steve’s flush deepened. “I’m ready, Steve,” he said, indulgent.

“Just kick in the damn door,” Steve sighed.

James did.

This base was only operated by a skeleton crew. There were scientists here, too, which alarmed Steve and made James’ gut clench. Those with guns were disposed of quickly, efficiently, and James tried not to think about anything at all, he let muscle memory do all the thinking for him. Killing the HYDRA agents felt good, but not as good as it felt to feel Steve at his back, fighting with his mask off.

Once the soldiers were dealt with, the question of what to do with the scientists was raised.

“We could kill them,” Steve said, gun raised to point directly between one of the scientists’ spectacled eyes. “If you want them dead, they’ll die.”

The scientist whimpered.

“Captain America shouldn’t have this much blood on his hands,” James said, raising his own weapon.

Steve fired. The scientist crumpled to the floor with a thud.

“Last I checked, I was Steve Rogers first, Cap second.” Steve’s face was impassive, but his eyes were on fire. James couldn’t look away. He was enraptured. “And Steve Rogers is more than willing to kill for you, Bucky. It’s actually harder to let them live than it is to kill them.”

That probably wasn’t meant to sound as romantic as it did.

“Well,” James said. He licked his lips. “Let’s kill ‘em, then.”

When Steve grinned, it was feral.

Together, they took out the other four scientists and left them where they fell. They were going to burn the base when they were through, anyway, and neither of them were over-eager to touch the bodies, not when there was still the basement to deal with, the door to which loomed like a gaping maw.

The stairs leading down were dark concrete. The lights were off. Steve took his cell phone out of his pocket and fiddled with it until the flashlight function illuminated their path downwards.

“After you,” Steve said. “I got your six.”

“Isn’t that my line?” James asked, but began the descent anyway.

His dread devoured him with every step. Had he been here before? His body seemed to remember, and it was doing its best to make him become ill when he finally hit the basement floor. He reached for the light switch and flipped it with fingers that trembled, watching the overhead lights flicker to life as bile touched the back of his tongue.

“Buck,” Steve murmured. He put his hand directly between James’ shoulder blades.

“I know this place,” James said. He couldn’t stop looking at the door at the other end of the hallway. The sterile white lights were hard on the eyes, but not hard enough to break his stare. His left arm ached again, throbbing, and this time he heeded its call, stumbling toward the door with one hand braced on the wall. He didn’t need to look behind himself to know that Steve was following.

He touched the door handle and snatched his hand back.

“You do it.” His voice was raw, almost unrecognizable.

Steve opened the door. It was unlocked. Another panel of light switches, then, and the room, which was larger than expected, lit up. Then three things happened at once.

One — two cryo tubes with bodies in them hummed as they turned on.

Two — Steve made an awful sound, guttural, unrepeatable. He grasped at the doorway for purchase.

Three — James was violently ill on the floor, retching hard enough to bend him in half.

Steve scrambled to help him, holding his hair out of the way until he was done. James leaned on him as he straightened and wiped his mouth with the back of a shaky hand.

“What,” he rasped.

“I don’t know,” Steve said, voice small. “I just don’t fucking know.”

James looked at the cryo tubes. His own face looked back at him, multiplied by two.

 

* * *

 

James sat while Steve called Natasha and Sam, perched on Steve’s car bumper with his elbows braced on his knees. Steve had handed him a small gatorade, and he tried to drink it slowly as instructed. It made his mouth taste somewhat better.

He couldn’t focus on anything. The mechanical motion of raising the plastic bottle to his lips every twelve seconds was as much as he could handle. He could hear Steve was talking, but the words didn’t make sense; they were just sounds, and his feet seemed very far away from him when he gazed at them. He twitched his toe. It took a lot of effort.

Steve’s feet came into view and James forced his head to tip back to look at him. Steve’s lips were moving. James watched them, uncomprehending, blinking up at him with filmy eyes.

“...Scaring the hell out of me,” Steve was saying, cupping James’ cheek. James let his voice wash over him, mouth hanging half open, phrases jumping out at him in brief snatches.

Steve stroked through his hair as he continued to talk on the phone, and James took careful mouthfuls of gatorade, and the bodies in the HYDRA basement waited with their eyes closed for someone to decide what to do next.

 

* * *

 

He woke up when Steve turned off the car engine.

How long he’d been out, he didn’t know. His mouth still tasted like something had died in it. It was dark again outside, streetlights casting a strange orange glow over the side of Steve’s face that he could see, dark shadows eating into the hollows of his cheek. He hadn’t noticed that James was conscious, and startled when James put a hand on his leg, just above the knee.

“You’re up,” Steve said, blinking.

“Yeah.” James rubbed his thumb over the inseam of Steve’s pants. “Sorry. I’m me again.”

“Buck.” Steve touched his face, thumbing over his lower lip. James let his mouth fall half open immediately, and Steve smiled, pained. “God. Buck. Stop apologizing.”

James sucked Steve’s thumb into his mouth in lieu of a reply. Steve watched him with wide eyes, entranced, and James just wished he’d let him apologize for something. Anything. Forgiveness was very hollow when he couldn’t even get three words into what he needed forgiveness _for_.

“You sure you’re good?” Steve asked, dragging wet thumb out of James’ mouth and trailing down his chin. James liked the way that felt. Liked the expression on Steve’s face as he watched his thumb stroke down James’ jaw.

“Wouldn’t say I was if I wasn’t.” James turned his face to press a kiss to the inside of Steve’s wrist. Steve allowed it for a moment before he took his hand back.

“Gotta face the music eventually,” he told James’ unhappy face. “C’mon. Maybe Tony has some answers for us by now.”

James unbuckled his seatbelt and followed Steve out of the car, but getting answers was what he was concerned about. There were some things that he was beginning to realize were better off left buried, better off left six feet under with no daylight to disturb them.

Whether or not he was one of those things was still up for debate.

“Listen, he’s... a handful, but you’ll get used to him,” Steve muttered, right before he opened the front door with his shoulders squared. “Stark, you in here?”

“The Star Spangled pain in my ass, nice of you to finally show up!” came a voice from inside, bright and cheery and somehow still menacing.

Steve looked like he was trying valiantly to swallow a wedge of lemon, and James stifled a smile as he closed the door behind them both.

The first sign that something was wrong wasn’t the bundle of live wires in a suit and mustache, it was Natasha and Sam, who both stood with their arms crossed in mutual signs of discomfort. James shifted to adjust the way his knife lay in its sheath on his thigh. He wasn’t planning on doing anything with it, at least not immediately, but it was comforting to feel under his hand.

Stark and Steve were already bickering about something, Stark’s hand on Steve’s arm, but James wasn’t really listening to them. He was meeting Natasha’s gaze, feeling his pulse start to pick up at what he saw on her face. She was cold again, calculating. He hadn’t seen her like that since —

“Anyway,” Stark announced, clapping his hands together. “I thought you’d be interested in what I’ve decrypted for you. Tricky stuff, by the way. Would’ve gotten it done a lot faster if you’d actually _called_ when you found it instead of going through Natasha. I’m hurt, Cap. I thought we were past this.”

“Don’t call me Cap,” Steve sighed.

“Steve, then. I can work with that. How about you, Winter Soldier? What’re you going by, other than Mrs. Rogers?” He laughed at his own joke. No one else did. “I can see you like the dark and broody type, Steve. Does he talk?”

“Sometimes,” James answered, eyes narrowed. “When I feel like it. I’m James Barnes, pleased to meet you.” He held out his hand to shake.

“Actually,” Stark said, ignoring the offered hand. “You aren’t.”

There was silence for a long moment.

“Excuse me,” Steve said quietly. Dangerously.

“Well. Biologically, yes, he’s Bucky Barnes,” Stark continued, waving a hand dismissively. “But that’s it. His body isn’t even twenty-five years old yet, and that’s taking cryostasis into account.”

The buzzing in James’ ears was back full force. He had thought he’d battled it back, but it rushed to the surface like blood to a wound, and he was gripping the back of a kitchen chair for purchase before Stark could finish a sentence.

“Impossible,” Steve said, voice hard, brooking no disagreement. “He was born in 1917. You can leave if you’re just going to —”

“Steve,” Natasha interrupted, very soft. “Hear him out.”

Steve opened his mouth, about to argue, but he closed it with a snap when he glanced over at James. James had crumpled more with every word until he was almost bent at the waist over the back of the chair he was leaning on.

“Hey,” Steve said, gentle again, and put his hand on the back of James’ neck, squeezing carefully. “You with us?”

James was reminded viscerally of Richardson, his handler, and snapped upright, batting Steve’s hand off him. “Talk,” he said sharply to Stark.

Stark looked startled, but he picked up a tablet that was set on the kitchen table anyway. James watched him type with his jaw clenched, aware of Steve at his side, and the concern that radiated off of him.

“Here,” Stark said, pushing the tablet at James across the table. “It’s — well, you can read for yourself, but the gist of it is that you’re. Ah.”

James glanced up. Stark was looking at Steve, who was glaring at him with so much venom that James wasn’t surprised Stark had stuttered to a halt.

“Tony,” Natasha said tiredly.

“There’s no good way to say it, okay, you can all stop looking at me like that,” Stark said, defensive. “You’re a clone, alright? Of the real James Barnes. Just like the others in the base, I’d bet, although I’d have to do some testing on them first to say for sure. You’re lucky Nat got blood and tissue samples from you, because otherwise I’d have had to take you back to my lab and, okay, Rogers, you’re going to want to calm down —”

“He’s not a clone!” Steve barked out. “He remembers me! Don’t you, Bucky?”

James didn’t answer. He was looking down at the tablet, scanning the paragraphs upon paragraphs of medical text under the header _Forget-Me-Not Protocol._

“Bucky,” Steve said again, and James looked up at him.

“HYDRA had memory removal technology,” he heard himself say, but his voice was foreign to him, heavy as lead. “It isn’t a stretch to think they could do the reverse.”

Steve gaped at him. His mouth hung open.

“He’s quick on the uptake.” Stark sounded approving. “Hey, who knows, Steve, maybe you’re getting a better model —”

Steve punched him so fast that none of them saw it coming. Stark was sent to the ground, reeling, skidding back a couple feet on the hardwood floor. Sam leapt up to grab Steve’s arm.

“C’mon, man, don’t do this,” he said, fingers curled tight around Steve’s bicep. “Get it together.” Steve was shaking with rage.

“Steve.” James licked his lips. Icy dread traced down his spine when Steve met his eyes, because there was nothing but outrage and betrayal on his face, and James had never seen that expression before. Not on Steve. Never directed at him. “I am. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t,” Steve bit out. He shook Sam’s arm off him. Then, with a straight back and clenched fists, “You don’t sound that surprised. Did you know?”

James thought about the hose he’d remembered attached to the back of his neck. He thought about Natasha, and their conversation in the dead of night where they’d agreed that his circumstances didn’t add up. He glanced at her, watching her help Stark to his feet. Stark, at least, had the good graces to appear at least a little chagrined.

“Mother _fucker_ ,” Stark mumbled under his breath, tonguing at a bloody lip.

“I had a feeling,” James admitted. “That something wasn’t right.”

Steve hissed a breath through his teeth, looking away.

“I didn’t know it was this bad,” James added quickly. “I swear. I didn’t know.”

Steve still had his head turned away, toward the door, tendons straining at his neck. James wanted to touch him, wanted to cup his cheek and make him look at him, but he had seen the way Steve had lashed out at Stark, and did not want that kind of violence enacted upon him. Not by Steve. He could take a punch from anyone, he was good at it, but not from Steve.

“I gotta get some air,” Steve muttered, and left, door slamming behind him.

Natasha and Sam shared a look, and then Natasha followed him. She closed the door with a much softer click.

“Well,” Stark said, dusting off his waistcoat with a sigh. “That could’ve gone better.”

“How the fuck did you think it was going to go?” Sam asked, disgusted. “You need to work on your bedside manner, dude.”

“I don’t see any bedside, tweety bird, do you?” Stark waved an arm at the room.

Sam raised his eyebrows. “Tweety bird?”

“Not my best,” Stark conceded. “Give me time.”

James had to sit down. His mind was reeling. His body felt strange and disconnected, each individual limb and muscle struggling to work in harmony.

“Hey, man,” Sam said, and knelt beside James’ chair, eyes searching his. “You okay? That’s a lot to take in all at once.”

James curled his fingers around Sam’s wrist. Sam’s eyes widened fractionally, tensing up, but he relaxed again once he was certain that James wasn’t about to attack him. James appreciated that caution. He wished Steve would exhibit it.

“Steve. He,” he started, and couldn’t say anything else.

“Yeah. I know,” Sam said, and, looking like he was braced for it to go poorly, pulled him into an embrace with an arm around his shoulders. James stiffened. He went along with it, though, tucking his face into the crook of Sam’s neck.

“Touching,” Stark commented. “Should I have gone for the hug instead? Would that have stopped me from getting punched?”

“Take a wild guess,” Sam said, and Stark snorted a laugh.

 

* * *

 

Steve didn’t come back that night. James wanted to ask where he was, but he was pretty sure that Steve would have told him if he wanted him to know.

Sam stuck around, though, which was surprising.

“I’m not cooking today,” Sam announced, and ordered Thai food that James managed to eat a little of, curled up on the couch with his legs tucked under him.

The best part about Sam was that he was not afraid of silence. Where Steve scrambled to awkwardly fill it, Sam was content to let it sit, scrolling his phone or poking at a takeout container. James was not very good at talking. Sam did not expect it of him, though, and this was a relief, even if he could feel the unspoken words welling up under his tongue.

“You’ve got something on your mind,” Sam said, long after the movie he’d put on had played itself out. He was mopping up sauce on his plate with a spring roll, and James watched the movement of his fingers with his sniper’s focus. Sam touched things with the same delicacy that Steve did. “You wanna talk about it, or?”

“Are you not bothered by the fact that I am... what I am?” James asked, and even his quiet voice felt too big for the little room.

Sam looked at him sideways. “Why would I be?”

James fiddled with his plastic fork. “Steve is.”

“I didn’t know you before,” Sam said with a shrug. “So I’m not lookin’ for some other guy when I look at you. I guess that helps.”

James looked at the television, watching the flicker of the DVD menu screen as it played over and over again on mute. “I thought I could be the other guy,” he said. “If I tried hard.”

Sam frowned. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” James wiped his right palm on his knee, because it had started to sweat. His left, as always, remained impassive and unaffected by his nerves. “There’s nothing I’ve wanted more than to be Steve’s Bucky. I thought. I thought I was allowed to have that. I thought that was something I could choose to become.”

“What about now?” Sam asked.

James’ mouth twisted. “HYDRA killed the man Steve was in love with,” he said. “To pretend otherwise would be a — a desecration.”

Sam’s eyebrows jumped toward his hairline. “Uh. So that kiss. You two...?”

James nodded. Sam winced.

“Yikes,” he said, not unsympathetically, and put his hand on James’ ankle, holding it a little. James let him. Sam’s hand was warm, and no less so for the fact that it was not a hand that was usually on him.

 

* * *

 

Steve still didn’t come back, so James decided to put himself to work.

He read through the entirety of the file on the Forget-Me-Not Protocol. It was difficult, but he finished it, because he knew this was information he needed to have in order to continue making decisions.

What he learned was this:

HYDRA had cloned Bucky Barnes twenty times. James was their most recent (and most successful) completed experiment.

The clones were raised in test tubes and clean rooms, and then were fed training protocol directly from the original model’s brain. The transfer of his memories had not been an intended consequence or an anticipated side effect. They had thought that they had erased them successfully enough to prevent it from happening, but they had been wrong.

The other bodies in the base that he and Steve had uncovered had not yet had training or memories transferred into their brains. They were blank slates. There was nothing inside them except how to breathe and possibly respond to commands.

The reason why HYDRA had wanted so badly to have a weapon bearing Bucky Barnes’ face was not spelled out or explained to James’ satisfaction. As far as he could gather, Zola — who was the closest thing he had to a creator — had been obsessed. And maybe the twisted irony of using Captain America’s Jewish best friend to enact Nazi violence had been enough to warrant this obsession.

He drove to the base and looked in at the bodies that waited, asleep, inside their glass cases. He wondered if HYDRA had been right about them being empty, about them not having souls. He wanted to wake them up and ask them himself, but he was afraid of what the answer would be.

If they were truly blank, if there was nothing in there, then the only reason he was any different was because he had a stolen piece of Bucky Barnes’ soul inside him. A pale imitation of the real thing, filtered through eighteen generations of clones.

“I’m sorry,” he told one of them, left hand splayed over the glass. The clone’s metal arm glinted at him ominously, perfect and polished, unlike James’, which had been well-tested in battle. He should’ve been in there with the rest of them. He hadn’t done anything to deserve being let out. Everything good and clean that Steve had seen in him hadn’t been him, it’d just been Bucky, and the history that belonged to him, that James wasn’t really allowed to claim.

He could remember it, though. At least a little. He had no right to, but he could see Steve’s little artist’s hands and soft blond mop of hair if he closed his eyes and concentrated.

What was he, if not Bucky Barnes? A walking headstone? A living testament to someone long dead?

Would it be disrespectful if he was anything more than that?

James put his fingertips to his mouth and thought about Steve’s kisses, and the way that they scorched him all the way down to the bone. Those kisses hadn’t been meant for him. Steve had been trying to kiss a dead man that James had been impersonating.

Sam was waiting for him at home, so James left the base, but he paused when he encountered the bodies of the HYDRA agents he and Steve had killed. The bodies were beginning to rot. Something had to be done with them. James did not want to touch them, but he was the only one here.

He dragged them all outside one by one and lay them in a pile. Then he went back in and rummaged around in the tool closets until he found a shovel, hidden with a collection of mops and buckets, heavy and good in the hand. He tramped outside and started digging with the sun beating down on his shoulders, thinking about Steve, and the dull ache that came with him.

Was the longing for Steve real? It certainly felt real enough. It was probably the realest thing he knew.

He tossed dirt over his shoulder and he still wanted him. He panted for breath, stomping on the shovel’s head to push it deeper into the ground, and he still wanted him. Sunlight went from yellow to orange to purple-red, sweat dripping from his forehead down the bridge of his nose, and he still wanted him. He leaned back against the dirt wall behind him and thought of foxholes, thought of shallow war graves, thought of his kill count, thought of Steve —

— and selfishly, desperately, wanted him.

He threw the bodies into the grave once he was sure it was deep enough. He tried not to notice the odd angles at which their limbs landed, and quickly covered them with dirt that he shoveled in, more frantic with each toss.

What else was he burying with them? Nothing that would put up much of a fuss. Nothing that wasn’t already dead.

 

* * *

 

Sam looked exhausted when James returned, but he still smiled a little when James wiped his feet on the doormat before he walked inside.

“Anything I need to know about?” he asked, giving James an up-and-down look, taking in sight of the dirt that was caked on the knees of James’ pants and streaked across his face.

“Just tying up loose ends,” James said, and took off his jacket, hanging it up on the hook. “Have you heard from Steve?”

Sam patted the cushion next to him on the sofa, so James joined him. “Not yet. Sorry.”

James hadn’t really been expecting it, but his chest still panged a little. It must have showed on his face, because Sam made a sympathetic noise and nudged him with his knee. The gesture was more compassionate than James deserved.

“Sam,” James said, and wondered at the fact that that name felt so good in his mouth, when so little did. “Are we alright?”

Sam just looked at him, surprised. “Where did _that_ come from?”

James shrugged. “I hurt you. You have no reason to trust me.”

“Well.” Sam looked a little sheepish. “To be honest, I don’t. Not completely.”

James nodded. That was a good tactical decision.

“But I don’t distrust you, either,” Sam continued. “I guess we’re... starting over, yeah? I don’t know you, you don’t know me, we’re just gonna have to get to know each other before we make up our minds.”

One corner of James’ mouth quirked up. “I’ve already made up my mind about you,” he said. “I trust you.”

Sam grinned, wide and toothy. “That’s a good decision. I’m a pretty trustworthy guy.”

James thought it was a pretty good decision too.

They fell into a comfortable silence, Sam going back to the book in his lap and James working at getting his boots untied. He sighed once he’d loosened them enough to kick them off, leaning back against the sofa and stretching himself out limb by aching limb.

“Hey, Sam.”

Sam glanced up from his book again. “Yeah?”

“Thanks,” James said. “Just. Thanks.”

Sam nudged him again, but let his leg stay there afterward, knee resting against knee. James could feel the kindness of it through his jeans. “Feels good to get a second chance, huh?”

James rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “Feels good to get a first one.”

Sam’s face did something strange, like he was trying to decide whether or not to smile or flinch. He didn’t move away, though, just put his hand on James’ arm, too, for a long moment.

“You should get washed up, man, can’t believe I let you on the couch with all that mud you’re tracking everywhere,” he said eventually. The levity was forced. James appreciated it all the same.

“Okay,” James said. He didn’t stand up until several seconds later when Sam pulled his hand away.

 

* * *

 

He woke in the dead of night from a dream where icy-cold hands were clutching at him, pulling him apart. He’d been grateful, though, in the dream. He had been tired of holding himself together.

He kicked the blankets off his legs and paced to the window, where he checked the lock twice. It made him feel a little better. The street outside was quiet, but he didn’t trust it, he still put himself at either side of the window to check the sight lines. He thought about checking in on Sam, making sure he was still breathing —

And then a piece of the dream hit him hard enough that he had to grip the windowsill to keep his balance.

Richardson.

He’d been trying not to think of him this whole time, but he crept in at the edges anyway, with his gloves and cool smile. James could feel the specter of him pressing down on the back of his neck. It seeped into his skin and poisoned him.

Was Richardson dead? It would be difficult to check. They hadn’t exactly been crossing off names as they worked their way through bases. But James doubted a scientist as high up on the ladder as Richardson would be lingering in any poorly-hidden base like the ones they’d unearthed so far, not Richardson, with his clever eyes and clean hands and wallet-sized photographs of his children.

He would be good at hiding. James knew this. He would be good at hiding and difficult for anyone but James to recognize, because James knew him deeply with the kind of recognition that always came with fear. Everyone else could be easily fooled by his gentlemanly veneer.

The worry about what would happen if Richardson recovered the other clone bodies in the base bit into him with sharp teeth.

“Okay,” he mumbled to himself, pressing fingertips into his temples, where a headache had begun to pulse. “Okay. Okay.”

He glanced at the clock, which read 1:53 in bright green numbers. Could he wait until morning? He didn’t think he could risk it, so he rubbed the last of the sleep from the corners of his eyes with the heels of his hands and took a deep breath, mentally going over all the places in the safe house in which he’d hidden weapons.

He knew, in the back of his head, that the only reason he was contemplating going on this kind of mission now was because he had very little left to lose. Still. It needed doing, and he was not ashamed of this.

By the time he’d collected all the weapons and packed them into a knapsack, it was 2:12 and anxiety had infected him thoroughly. He decked himself out in the combat gear he’d been given, tac vest and belt with pouches for ammo, his old leather gloves. He buckled his gun holster to his belt and strapped his knife to his thigh, lying the sheath flat.

He glanced at himself in the bathroom mirror. He would have looked more formidable if his eyes weren’t so damn haunted.

He thought about it for a couple seconds, then dug around in his knapsack until he came up with the little tin of eyeblack he’d carried on him ever since HYDRA had started giving him missions. He dipped two flesh and blood fingers into it, coating them thoroughly, and smeared black under and around his eyes. There. Yes. There was the Winter Soldier again, a little worse for the wear, maybe, but just as fierce as always, ghost-like and terrible to behold.

“James?”

Sam was in the doorway to his bedroom, leaning against the frame. His voice was sleepy and worried.

“Go back to sleep, Sam,” James said, screwing the lid back on the tin, and tossed it back into his bag. He tied his hair back with a rubber band, but it made his cheekbones look too sharp, so he took it out again. “I found another mission. I’ll be back later today.”

Sam frowned. “More loose ends?”

“Yeah.” James turned away from the bathroom mirror so he could look at him. “Maybe the one that I should’ve tied up first.”

“That’s ominous as hell,” Sam yawned. “You need backup?”

“No,” James said. “But tell me if Steve gets in contact with you.” He took the earpiece that Sam had given him out of his pocket, smiling slightly. “This thing work long distance?”

Sam smiled back. “Should do, long as you don’t go all the way to Antarctica. Stark made ‘em.”

“Right.” James put the earpiece in, tapping it to turn it on. “That’s why Steve keeps him around.”

Sam choked on a laugh. “They’re also friends. Sometimes. I think.”

James could hear the tell-tale crackle of static as the earpiece came online, which then subsided into nothing. He’d forgotten how good it felt to be properly weighed down with weapons, the kinds that he’d been trained to use and use well.

Trained by the same man he was about to track down and kill.

“I’ll be back,” he said again, although if he was trying to reassure himself or Sam, he was fairly certain he didn’t succeed in either regard.

“Hey.” Sam put a hand on James’ arm, stopping him from walking to the door. “Tell me the truth. Should I be going with you?”

James paused, considering it. Sam was good in a fight. But that would require Sam being in the same room as Richardson — Richardson, within touching distance of the breakable bones of Sam’s body —

“No,” he said, and gently pushed Sam’s hand off his arm. “I can handle it.”

Sam’s expression was very shrewd. “And you’re gonna make it back in one piece?”

“Yes,” James said. He tried to smile. “I’ll be okay.”

He could feel Sam’s eyes burning a hole through the back of his tac vest as he opened the door and stepped through it, but he had to put that out of his mind, because he was about to chase down the man who scared him the most, and he could not afford to be distracted.

The first thing he did was steal a motorcycle. It wasn’t difficult — he felt a little guilty as he hot-wired it, but he figured it was for a pretty good cause, all things considered — and then he was speeding off toward the highway with his hair whipped back from his face with the wind and his hands clenched tight around the grips.

He drove a little over forty-five miles, then killed the engine in front of a new base that Natasha’s leaked information had led him to. Smaller than the rest, but most definitely occupied, this was not a compound that James had ever visited before. He assessed the entrance, worrying his lower lip between his teeth, and thought about Steve, and the HYDRA agents they’d killed together. The way it felt to kill on Steve’s command. The way it felt to prepare to kill on his own.

The night was dark and thick enough to taste through his half-parted lips.

Word may have spread about the other missions, but James doubted that they were expecting him. Only a man with a death wish would attempt to infiltrate and take on a HYDRA base by himself.

James shucked the rifle off his shoulder and slid the safety off with a click. They weren’t going to know what hit them.

 

* * *

 

Twenty-three minutes later, everyone in the base was dead except for one agent that the Winter Soldier was beating the ever-loving shit out of.

It felt good. His metal hand had been made for this, and it felt all the better for doing what it had been created for: curling into a fist and crushing faces, crushing bone.

“Give me an address,” the Winter Soldier demanded. His metal knuckles were red and slick.

The man choked out something, but it came out garbled.

“Enunciate,” the Soldier growled. “I don’t have all day.”

The agent coughed up an address, then some blood. The Soldier allowed this, let him catch his breath, and then snapped his neck in one fluid motion that sent the body to the floor with a dull thud. He watched it lie there for a couple seconds, then pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket with his right hand so he could clean blood out of the plates of his left while he panted from exertion.

This was the one drawback to being part machine. This and the fact that he hadn’t been able to feel the warmth coming off of Steve’s body with his left arm, hadn’t been able to frame that face between two palms that could feel the smoothness of his skin...

He shook his head, briefly, to clear it.

He set the charges he and Steve had planned to use on the other base, careful to put them to the parts of the architecture that would collapse easily upon each other. He could feel the eyes of the dead HYDRA agents staring at him as he worked, so he quickened his pace, holding the detonator very carefully.

He was relieved when he could finally scramble out of the base and get on the motorcycle again, peeling out the driveway fast. He didn’t look behind himself as he hit the detonator, but he smiled a little when he heard the explosion behind him, feeling the heat at his back.

 

* * *

 

_“Where are we going?” Steve had asked, defeated, small shoulders squared as he stuffed his hands in his pockets and pretended that he’d been holding his own in the back alley fight._

_“The future,” Bucky had answered, slinging his arm around him with a grin that was loose and easy as it had ever been back then. The future loomed in front of their feet with a dark shadow, but he wanted to see Steve smile before he left, smile for real. Not the little pinched thing he got every now and again these days. The real deal, teeth and all, and maybe he wanted to see Steve on the dance floor for once, pretty mouth working around a girl’s name._

_He took his arm back after a second, because Steve was grimy from the alley floor, and also because he gave Bucky a look that was half speculation and half hope, and it made Bucky’s stomach clench with a guilt that he was reluctant to name._

_The future was where they were headed, it was true. It just took them a little longer to get there than they’d expected._

 

* * *

 

It was 3:45 by the time he pulled up in front of Richardson’s house. He hadn’t known what he’d expected; a laboratory, maybe, like the basement cells he’d spent most of his time in from birth to present. Not this: a large family home with many windows, bordering on showing off the their wealth, but somehow managing to pale just enough in comparison to the other houses on the block that it faded into the background.

He turned off the earpiece before he did anything. He didn’t want Sam to hear what he was about to do.

All the lights were off inside. The Soldier thought of the photographs of children that Richardson kept in his wallet and showed off when asked about them, and quickly did the math in his head — they wouldn’t all be old enough to be moved out yet. There would still be children in this home.

Bucky Barnes wasn’t the kind of guy who would execute a man in front of his children. Neither, come to think of it, was the Soldier.

He picked the lock instead of smashing the window like he wanted to. It clicked softly as it opened, and he closed it behind himself just as gently. He tried to make his footsteps very quiet as he ascended the stairs, taking in the sight of the paintings on the stairwell walls, the shallow bowl full of keys on the landing, the books stacked up haphazardly on shelves. The fact that Richardson and his family had been living like this all these years while the Soldier had been rotting in cryostasis made him so angry that he was no longer afraid.

He slipped like a shadow into the bedroom at the end of the hall and looked down at the sleeping bodies of Richardson and his wife. He was visibly older than the last time they’d been face to face, silver hair at the temples and crows feet at the corners of his eyes, but the Soldier knew it was him, even by the sliver of his profile that he could see in the dim moonlight.

He clapped a hand over Richardson’s mouth, pinching his nose together with finger and thumb.

Richardson woke immediately, eyes flying open, and struggled for a second before the Soldier put a gun to the back of his neck. Richardson must have known what it was, because he froze, eyes widening. His wife shifted in her sleep, but subsided again.

“I’m taking you out of here as a kindness,” the Soldier murmured once he was certain that the wife was deeply asleep. His mouth was close to Richardson’s ear. “Cooperate or I _will_ kill you in your home. Nod if you understand.”

Richardson nodded jerkily, so the Soldier took his hand back from his face. Richardson gasped for breath, but didn’t make sound, just sat up and watched the Soldier like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. The Soldier zip tied Richardson’s wrists and pulled him up, keeping an eye on the bed as he nudged him toward the door with his gun pushed up against the small of his back, but Mrs. Richardson didn’t stir. Maybe she was used to her husband’s odd hours by now.

All the Soldier could hear was the rush of blood in his ears and the quiet, panicked breaths from the scientist that he was leading down the stairs. Past the photographs on the walls. Past the athletic trophies with his son’s names engraved on them. Past the living room with the indentations of bodies having sat recently on the sofa.

“Soldier —” Richardson tried to say. The Soldier dug the muzzle of the gun into the space between his shoulder blades, a warning, and that shut him up again. The Soldier kicked the door closed behind them and shoved Richardson toward the bike that was waiting for them in the driveway.

“Where are you going to take me?” Richardson asked. He sounded very calm, but the Soldier could hear the fear underneath it. He was glad he could scare him. Usually it would have been him biting back the terror. But it was difficult to be terrified of Richardson when he was in his sleep clothes and near-sighted without his glasses, hair in disarray.

“Back to the start,” the Soldier answered, “Back to the beginning of it all,” and pistol-whipped him without warning, knocking him out cold before he hit the pavement.

He arranged Richardson on the motorcycle and nudged the kickstand up with the toe of his boot. He had a long drive ahead of him. He hoped Richardson would stay unconscious until they reached their destination.

 

* * *

 

He turned on the earpiece once he’d gone far enough that the adrenaline had burned off for the most part. “You there, Sam?” he asked.

There was a beat of silence, then, “You went dark for a while back there.”

The Soldier smiled a little to himself. “Got you worried?”

“Little bit,” Sam said. “How’s the mission going?”

The Soldier glanced at Richardson, who was either still knocked out, or a very good faker. “About as well as I hoped. I’m not, uh. Finished. I just wanted to let you know that I’m okay.”

“You should know that Steve called,” Sam said, and the Soldier could hear him sigh, long and low. “He’s coming back to the house.”

The Soldier could feel his heartbeat pick up again, racing uncomfortably fast in his chest. “Did he say why?”

“I don’t know, man. It wasn’t a long talk.”

The Soldier took several deep breaths, focusing on the road, on keeping Richardson on the bike.

“Hey,” Sam said gently. “Thanks for checking in. You didn’t have to.”

The Soldier huffed a laugh. “Yeah, I did. You’re team. You’re on my team.”

Sam made a sound that was somewhere between surprised and pleased. “Team, huh? When did you decide that?”

The Soldier wanted to say something cheesy like ‘when I met you’, but all he said was, “Long time ago. I’ll check in later, okay?”

“Okay,” Sam said. “Do me a favor and don’t die.”

“I’ll try my best,” the Soldier promised, and turned off the earpiece again.

 

* * *

 

Dawn was just beginning to glow over the horizon when the Soldier arrived at the base, the one with the clones inside it. It was secluded and off the grid, which meant that they most likely would not be interrupted. Maybe it was morbid to take his hostage to the site of his own torture. But this was a revenge mission, after all, and he wasn’t the only person with his face that needed justice.

He slung Richardson over his shoulder and hauled him into the base, by now a familiar path. He passed the gravesite, but did not look at the freshly-turned dirt, just focused on putting one foot in front of the other, even when his body was screaming at him for returning again to the place that made him feel so sick. The sterile hallways made his footsteps echo, bright lights stabbing his eyes after so long in the dark, and then he was in the basement once again, setting Richardson down into the big chair that was nailed to the floor, the one with the restraints installed on the arm rests. The restraints closed around Richardson’s biceps with a sharp sound when the Soldier hit the button, wrists still zip-tied and resting in his lap.

It was a hell of a sight. Is that what the Soldier had looked like sitting in that chair? A body looked so much smaller when it was fenced in by thick metal cuffs.

He slapped Richardson with the back of his metal hand to wake him. It took two tries, but then Richardson was crying out, jerking as far away from the Soldier as he could, and it was time for the real work to begin.

“Welcome back,” the Soldier said, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest. “You know where you are?”

Richardson glanced around himself with wild eyes. “The lab,” he breathed. “There were men working here...”

“Not anymore,” the Soldier said. “You know who I am?”

Richardson looked at him. He nodded.

“Good.” The Soldier dragged a stool over from the edge of the room so he could perch himself down in front of his hostage, eyes piercing as he met his gaze. “‘Cause I got questions.”

“Of course you’re confused,” Richardson said, wetting his lips carefully. “You need to be reset. You are going against all your protocols.”

“Shut the fuck up,” the Soldier snapped. “Talk when I say talk. I’m not afraid to kill you right now.”

He fingered the trigger on his handgun, making a point, and Richardson closed his mouth with an audible click.

“Alright,” the Soldier said. He scuffed a hand through his hair. “So you made me. Okay, I get it. I’m good at what I do. You built me that way. But you fucked me up.”

Richardson shifted, eyeing the Soldier’s gun. “Hardly. You were the most successful of all the clones we made.”

“You _fucked me up_ ,” the Soldier repeated, voice breaking. His eyes stung. “You put all this love in me. You put this dead man’s love in me by mistake and I can’t shake it, I gotta love him. He ain’t mine to love, but I gotta love him.”

Richardson, alarmed, watched him with his mouth hanging open.

“You know what I am?” the Soldier continued, standing up from the stool so he could pace as he talked. “I’m Frankenstein’s fucking creature, I’m a monster wearing this good man’s face, and you — Christ. Okay. Tell me honest, are there people in those bodies?” He waved his gun in the direction of the two sleeping clones. “Are there? ‘Cause if you lied in your reports about them the way you lied about me —”

“No,” Richardson said quickly. “No. They were never operated on.”

The Soldier looked at the clones for a moment. They wore his face too, but they were so much younger than him, peaceful and sad. They’d been in stasis for so long, waiting for someone to need them.

“You aren’t going to kill me,” Richardson said, voice soft, cajoling. “Wasn’t it easier when you were following orders? You could do that again. I could take away the memories for good this time. Wouldn’t it be better that way?”

The Soldier’s breath started to come fast and scared.

“Yes,” Richardson continued, a gentle, benevolent smile on his face. “Yes. I know what you need, Soldier. I know you better than anyone else.”

“No offense, sir,” the Soldier rasped. “But you don’t know jack shit.”

He fired the gun once. Twice. Three times. Emptied the whole clip. Then he dropped the gun. Then he almost vomited, falling back against the wall behind him, clapping a hand over his mouth to try and keep the awful animal sounds inside where they belonged.

“Buck?”

James nearly swallowed his tongue.

Steve poked his head through the door. He took in the sight of Richardson, face and torso shot to a bloody pulp, the mess of it leaking down onto his pajamas. He took in the sight of James, and it was just like the way he used to before, all soft in the eyes and at the mouth. Like he was grateful for the opportunity to look at him.

“You okay?” he asked, sounding like he really cared about the answer.

James nodded.

“Sam told me you were going after someone real bad, so I followed the tracker in your earpiece. Glad he didn’t give you much trouble.” Steve glanced at Richardson in distaste. “Wish you hadn’t gone alone, though.”

“Steve,” James whispered. “How much of that did you hear?”

“Enough,” Steve said. “Buck —”

“I’m sorry,” James interrupted, because the words tumbled out of his mouth faster than he could keep up with. “I’m so fucking sorry, Steve. I thought I could. It wasn’t. I wanted.”

“Hey. Hey.” Steve took careful steps forward, leaning into James’ space to touch his face sweetly, tenderly, cupping his cheek and stroking thumb over his cheekbone. “I’ve been thinking about what happened back at the house. And I think I got it all wrong.”

James just leaned his cheek into Steve’s palm. “Steve,” he said.

“I know Bucky Barnes like the back of my hand,” Steve said. James flinched. “No, no, _hey_ — listen. I know him. He’s selfless. Hurts real easy, but that’s only ‘cause he loves even easier. He’s an incredible shot. Loyal as hell. Would lay down his life for a stranger, ‘cause that’s just how good he is.”

James felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. “Steve...”

“Just listen to me, okay?” Steve kept his hand on James’ face, holding his gaze. As if James could have ever looked away. “I _know_ him. And everything you’ve done from the beginning has been what Bucky would have done. You’ve had my back from the start, just like him. If you say you don’t wanna be him, if you wanna be something else, that’s okay. I can respect that.”

James touched Steve’s lips, feeling the words as Steve made them.

“But if I’m the only thing standing in the way of you bein’ who you are, you can stop right there,” Steve said. “You’re Bucky Barnes. You’re enough of him to count.”

“I’m. Really messed up,” James confessed, like it was a secret.

Steve smiled, pained. “I know. That’s why I’m not gonna leave you again. I’m sorry I left, before. I didn’t get it. But I get it now.”

“Your Bucky wasn’t queer. I’m _bent_ , Steve, I’m not —”

Steve shut him up with a kiss, pushing James into the wall and pressing close, and James sobbed into it, trying to kiss back as he clutched at Steve’s lapels.

“Who knows, okay?” Steve said, breathless, as he leaned their foreheads together. “Just ‘cause it didn’t work out back then doesn’t mean... Buck. Look at me. You want me now?”

James nodded, helpless.

“I want you too.” Steve wiped the tears that streamed down James’ face with the pads of his thumbs. “I want you so bad.”

James was shaking all the way down, body wracked with tremors. “You don’t want me. You want the other guy. Your Bucky. I barely remember shit, I’m not enough.”

Steve kissed him again. James melted into it.

“Let me love you,” Steve murmured, lips still brushing over James’. “How many times are you gonna make me say it?”

James whimpered, but he pulled Steve into another kiss with a hand on the back of his head, and he could only assume this was answer enough. They kissed for a while, really taking their time with it as they relearned the shape of each other’s mouths, but eventually James got too overwhelmed and had to press his face into Steve’s shirt until he stopped trembling. Steve seemed content to hold him, rubbing a hand up and down James’ back.

“What do you want to do about the clones?” Steve asked. James could feel the rumble of his voice beneath his cheek. “If they’re brain-dead, or close to it, there’s not much we’re going to be able to do for them. Take them to my friend Bruce’s lab, maybe.”

James pulled back a little, just so Steve could see how serious he was. “I want to wake them up.”

There was a little worried crease between Steve’s brows. “Is that a good idea? We don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“I gotta know,” James said. “If they’re people. If there are people in there.”

Steve looked troubled, but he nodded. “Here?”

“Yeah. Why? You wanna haul two enormous cryo tanks out of here?”

Steve laughed, startled. “Well. When you say it like that.”

James pulled away from Steve, but he laced their fingers together, pulling him with him as he crossed the room toward the tanks.

“Think Sam will mind a couple more traumatized supersoldiers at the dinner table?” he asked, eyeing the scanner for a second before he grabbed Richardson’s dead hand and pressed it to the keypad. It lit up blue, the tank hissing steam as it opened.

“I really doubt it,” Steve said. “I think he sort of collects us.”

James moved to the other tank, pressing Richardson’s hand to this one as well. Then he stepped back and held Steve’s hand tight, the both of them watching, waiting, holding their breath.

Would he be able to put the clones out of their misery if they truly were as empty as advertised? He didn’t think he could, and it made him go cold. But Steve was warm and solid at his side, and, God. Steve. Steve, with his gun callouses and fingernails bitten down to the quick, with his sad little smile and soft eyes; James was unashamed of the way that he clung to him.

“We’ll take care of it,” Steve said, squeezing James’ hand. “Whatever happens. I promise.”

The clones woke slowly, eyes fluttering open. They looked around blankly, and James’ heart lurched in his chest —

— but the first thing they did when they became aware of their surroundings was reach for each other.

**Author's Note:**

> Possibly the most fucked up story I've ever written, but hell if I'm not proud of it.
> 
> I'm jewishcap on tumblr! Come say hi :)


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